Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics. Narratives, Concepts, and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries 9783770559398

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Pauline Bachmann · Melanie Klein · Tomoko Mamine Georg Vasold (Eds.) Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics

BERLINER SCHRIFTEN ZUR KUNST

herausgegeben vom

KUNSTHISTORISCHEN INSTITUT DER FREIEN UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN

2017

Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics Narratives, Concepts, and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries

Edited by Pauline Bachmann, Melanie Klein, Tomoko Mamine, Georg Vasold

Wilhelm Fink

Die Publikation dieses Bandes wurde durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft im Rahmen ihrer Förderung der Forschergruppe 1703 Transkulturelle Verhandlungsräume von Kunst. Komparatistische Perspektiven auf historische Kontexte und aktuelle Konstellationen ermöglicht. The German Research Foundation (DFG) enabled the publication of this volume with funds provided for Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art: Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Current Constellations.

Cover illustration: Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1939, ink and watercolour on paper, 26.7 × 20.6 cm (courtesy of the Estate of Ernest Mancoba / Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen)

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dieses Werk sowie einzelne Teile desselben sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen ist ohne vorherige schriftliche Zustimmung des Verlags nicht zulässig. © 2017 Wilhelm Fink Verlag, ein Imprint der Brill-Gruppe (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland) Internet: www.fink.de Einbandgestaltung: Evelyn Ziegler, München Herstellung: Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn ISBN 978-3-7705-5939-8

Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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PAULINE BACHMANN / MELANIE KLEIN / TOMOKO MAMINE / GEORG VASOLD Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I.

NARRATIVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

29

SHIGEMI INAGA Western Modern Masters Measured on the East-Asian Literati Template: Hashimoto Kansetsu and the Kyoto School of Sinology . . .

31

PAOLA IVANOV Rethinking Coevalness: Entangled History and the Objects of Ethnological Museums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

SYLVESTER OKWUNODU OGBECHIE Art, Nationalism, and Modernist Histories: Writing Art History in Nigeria and South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71

MATTHEW RAMPLEY Evolution, Aesthetics, and World Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

93

GEORG VASOLD The Revaluation of Art History: An Unfinished Project by Josef Strzygowski and His School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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II. CONCEPTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

139

MICHAEL ASBURY Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

MELANIE KLEIN Modes of Creation: Art Teaching in South Africa and Uganda between Theory and Practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

153

TOBIAS WENDL Fictions, Fakes, and Authenticities: A Survey of Artistic Practices from Africa and the Diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169

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CONTENTS

PARTHA MITTER Jamini Roy: Negotiating the Global from a Local Perspective . . . . . . .

195

III. PRACTICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

207

PAULINE BACHMANN Grasping Writing and Form: Neoconcretism between Language and Object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

209

BIRGIT HOPFENER Intervention Is the Answer, but What Are the Questions? Developing Criteria for a Critical Examination of Qiu Zhijie’s Interventionist Project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

229

TOMOKO MAMINE Questioning Frames of Art History: Murakami Saburō’s Breakthrough in 6 Holes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

247

JULIANE NOTH Comparing the Histories of Chinese and Western Landscape Painting in 1935: Historiography, Artistic Practice, and a Special Issue of Guohua Yuekan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

265

ISABEL WÜNSCHE Transgressing National Borders and Artistic Styles: The November Group and the International Avant-Garde in Berlin during the Interwar Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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IV. PLATES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

308

V. APPENDIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

325

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

327

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

331

Acknowledgements This volume gathers together fourteen essays originally presented at the conference Questioning Narratives, Negotiating Frameworks. Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics, Late 19th to Early 21st Centuries, which was held from 5 to 7 December 2013 at the Department of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin. It was the third annual conference of its kind hosted by the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art. Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Contemporary Constellations, and it was initiated by the members of the Project Area C From the Invention of “World Art” to the Decentering of Modernism. The research programme of the Unit includes projects on historical periods ranging from the early modern to the late modern period with a focus on the artistic entanglements, exchange, and negotiations between different geographic areas in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. One of its major aims is to unite regional and historical expertise into a broader scholarly framework that elaborates comparative methodologies and models in order to connect and enrich regional art histories without leveling out their particularities. The book’s main title Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics highlights this endeavour. The term “Art(slash)Histories” refers not only to the multiplicity of and potential competition between historical accounts and divergent perspectives, but also stresses the agency of artworks and their often neglected role in the making and shaping of histories. In this context Transcultural Dynamics serves as framing device. Here one small caveat is necessary, since we do not consider transculturality to be the ontological state or condition of cultural materials, nor a mere epiphenomenon of recent globalization tendencies. The prefix trans, in this case, rather indicates our emphasis on contact, connectedness, and connectivity, and we have deliberately joined it with the term dynamics in order to stress the openness, variety and, at times, even contradictory results of transcultural flows and processing, which may include adaptation, appropriation, translation, and transformation as well as resistance and rejection. Our attempt at contributing to the decentering of the hegemonic Western narrative of artistic modernism is combined with a critical re-evaluation of earlier efforts in developing world art histories. The book thus combines critical essays with case studies from Brazil, India, China, Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda. As the subtitle indicates, the lines of thematic inquiry include narratives, concepts, and practices. Although heavily interwoven, they appear as major nodes within the larger art historical networks: Narratives are grounded in concepts and practices, concepts and narratives are put into action through practices, and practices in turn frame and reflect what can be conceptualized and narrated. This volume is the result of a committed team effort and has enjoyed the generous support of various institutions. We would like to express our gratitude to the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Ethnologisches Museum, and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin; to our colleagues at the Research Unit; and to

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the invited speakers and authors who kindly agreed to contribute to this volume. We would particularly like to thank Pauline Bachmann, Melanie Klein, Tomoko Mamine, and Georg Vasold for their meticulous editorial work; Ulrike Boskamp, Alberto Saviello, Kerstin Schankweiler, and Tobias Vogt for their moderation and comments during the conference; Franziska Lesák for taking the organisation into her capable hands; Saskia Nolte, Doris Rebhan, and Philipp Zobel for their support, whenever it was needed; Hubert Graml, the photographer at the Department of Art History at Freie Universität, for his expertise in dealing with the figures; Jonathan Blower and Angela Roberts for translating and proofreading the contributions; the Department of Art History at Freie Universität for including this volume in their series, Berliner Schriften zur Kunst; and, finally, Andreas Knop at Wilhelm Fink Verlag for steering this project toward publication. Berlin, February 2017 Paola Ivanov, Gregor Stemmrich, Tobias Wendl

PAULINE BACHMANN / MELANIE KLEIN / TOMOKO MAMINE GEORG VASOLD

Introduction Since the late nineteenth century, the conceptual and disciplinary frames of reference imposed on non-European art have undergone continuous negotiations, transfigurations, and contestations. Artists, art critics, and art historians throughout the world have challenged the categories of art that were coined in European metropolises within the traditions of academic disciplines such as art history and anthropology. The beginnings of this process dates back to the decades around 1900 when the dissolution of the historicist paradigm created a severe crisis in European art historical writing. This crisis was characterized by a far-reaching reorientation with regard to substance and methodology. Art scholars, mainly from German-speaking countries, started to reconsider the basic principles of their discipline. They had become increasingly aware of the deficits and inappropriateness of the old, Eurocentric nomenclature, and thus one of their most pressing duties was to consider the introduction of new terms. For instance, in 1891 for the K. K. Österreichisches Handelsmuseum in Vienna’s exhibition of Oriental rugs, which brought together more than 500 examples from all parts of Asia and North Africa, the then director, Arthur von Scala, demanded a critical review of the terms in use. Scala admitted that Western scholars were unable to fully grasp the significance of the ornamental design of the rugs or “… to describe it [using] a few confident words.” He concluded that “[t]he existing art terminology” needed to be expanded, and that one would not be able to avoid introducing “many new words” in order “to create at least fixed designations for the individual motifs unique to the ornaments of the Orientalrugs […], to distinguish their origins […] and their place in the history of art.”1 The Vienna carpet exhibition went far beyond the broad, albeit superficial, Western fascination for Oriental art and culture that was popular at that time: Although nowadays rarely acknowledged, the exhibition was nothing less than a turning point in art historiography. Scala and his team — among them Alois Riegl, one of the first art historians ever to use the term world art — sought new ways of approaching the Orient and therefore challenged academic art history writing in various aspects. As a merchandiser of textiles, Scala had a limited interest in questions of aesthetics and the normative values of art. Instead, he focused on subjects like trade routes, the working conditions of the weavers, the production of synthetic colours, the differing materiality of the threads, or the meaning of copies and doublets in textiles. In contrast to the “armchair” scholars at the universities, Scala had extensive first-hand knowledge of the regions the carpets came from and the circumstances under which they had been produced. As a member of the Aus-

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tro-Hungarian Expedition to Siam, China, and Japan (1868–1871) he began his collection of Asian artefacts at a young age, which he later displayed at the Handelsmuseum in Vienna. The goal of this museum was to popularize Oriental forms and to introduce them into European industrial and craft production. In pursuit of this goal, Scala regularly organized public discussions where artists, art scholars, and economists debated artistic and art historical issues within a wider, mainly economic framework, thus shedding light on the multiple relationships between the Orient and the Occident.2 Scala and his colleagues at the museum were well aware that the best way to encourage serious reflection on Oriental carpets was to contact people who had lived in the regions where these items were made. He invited scholars like George C. M. Birdwood and Sidney J. A. Churchill, who had both worked for the British Empire in India and Persia respectively, to contribute to the impressive three-volume publication produced for the Vienna exhibition. This is an early example of an encounter with art from outside Europe that questioned the conceptual and disciplinary frameworks of art history as they were executed in Europe. Indeed, it exemplifies some of the problems addressed in this volume: for example, the proper designation of non-Western artefacts, the questionable authority of art historical canons, and the need to expand academic focus to include cross-disciplinary boundaries. The rather intricate title of this anthology is thus a condensation of these and many more issues, which will be further elaborated in the following pages. We will look at how art and its multiple historiographies are entangled with specific narratives and how the theoretical paradigm of a transcultural perspective can highlight the dynamics in the formation of concepts and the practices of art.

Art/Histories Arthur von Scala’s innovations at the Handelsmuseum in Vienna and his search for new and better terms in the face of an incomprehensible wealth of exotic forms, was a path-breaking moment for art scholarship in Europe. He addressed all art historians who sought to overcome the Eurocentricity of their discipline in favour of a “universal art horizon.”3 Indeed, his goal of enlarging the narrow, Western-centred focus of art scholarship was widely appreciated at the beginning of the twentieth century, even among those art historians who were sceptical about the benefits of this approach.4 And it ultimately led to a strong mistrust of the established methods of art history in general. One of the main targets of criticism was the high dependency on the older disciplines of history and philology, which for decades had provided the methodological models for art scholarship in Europe. Some of the most prominent advocates of world art history paradoxically wanted to overcome history, that is, the notion of a linear historic development of art. They repeatedly denounced this traditional historical approach as an “aberration.”5 Influenced by diffusionist theories, which around 1900 were quite new and offered an alternative to the then dominant evolutionist paradigm, art scholars increasingly began to

INTRODUCTION

11

write about synchronic models in art history, introducing terms like “cultural areas” (Kulturkreise) and artistic “reciprocities” (Wechselwirkungen). For Oskar Bayer and Josef Strzygowski (the latter strongly influenced by Friedrich Ratzel) world art history should not be based on the “blindly over-estimated philological-historical […] method,”6 since such a method, they claimed, was not able to adequately analyse the artefacts of illiterate peoples and cultures. Instead, it was necessary to focus on what they repeatedly called the liveliness of art, which included engagement with contemporary artists and especially with artistic practises. It is no coincidence that Josef Strzygowski and his circle were most interested in what happened at the Bauhaus, and at art schools in general. Another characteristic of these early attempts to write a world art history was a critical questioning of the premises of a national art history. As Michel Espagne has recently underlined, it was around 1900 — when national and nationalistic narratives reached their apex in Europe — that several French, German, and Austrian art historians were proposing alternatives to the dominant discourse. Instead of praising the national heritage of art and looking for the origins of what was perceived as the domestic, own culture, and instead of tracing a linear, national development of iconographies and forms, they chose to focus on an international scope and intended to write “a history of transfers and encounters.”7 Since many of these art historians were experts on the art of the Late Antiquity and the Migration Period, they often carefully described processes of artistic exchanges and imbrications. Julius von Schlosser, for instance, who for years worked at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna at the department for ancient coins (a mobile, border-crossing medium par excellence), emphasized the innovative potential of migration in general. His argument was that the process of mobility — of migrating motifs — necessarily produces a cultural surplus: it is not a case of mere replication, but rather of constant metamorphosis, generating new and innovative artistic solutions. According to Schlosser, these “transformations” (Umwandlungsprozesse) and “wondrous interminglings” (wunderbarliche Durchmischungen) were the ultimate principles of all art; they constituted the very foundations upon which all art rests.8 “This process is typical of the way in which old, seemingly outmoded and discarded forms are able to find a new, more vigorous lease of life as they assimilate to new, often fortuitous ideas. But it is also typical of formal development in general.”9 As a matter of course, one might argue that this focus on the early attempts to create a world art history through the revision of its terms and methods are still trapped in a Eurocentric approach. Only when European art historians were confronted with other art did they feel the need to expand their methodological framework and rethink the discipline as a whole, while the possibility of historicizations from other places did not play any role in this reconceptualization. Yet it shows that European art historians at that historical moment were far more open to conceptualizing art in a way that has only recently become fashionable again.10 Thus, Michel Espagne is correct to call for an investigation of these forgotten concepts and for scholars to “re-read the historiography of art from the standpoint of the accent placed on exchanges.”11

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In non-European contexts the responses to the art historical gaze from the West were expressed in various ways. The significance of the partners of European art historians during these processes of exchange as well as of the mediators and interpreters who selected, prepared, and transmitted objects and knowledge cannot be overestimated. The extension of the infrastructures released by imperialist politics accelerated the mobility of information, objects, and persons. Key figures of cultural exchange come to mind in this context, such as the Indian cultural and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art scholar and curator Okakura Tenshin, who actually met Tagore in Calcutta on his travels to India in 1902 where they exchanged ideas on different conceptualizations of Asia.12 As Inaga and Noth point out in this volume, exchanges between Japanese and Chinese art protagonists generated narratives and practices that reflected and critically responded to Western concepts and theories. As the case of Japan reveals, the introduction of the notion of art and its institutionalized system entailed shifts and refractions of Western concepts such as modern, avant-garde, high and low, fine art and craft. We should also remember that Western concepts were applied within Japan’s own nationalist and imperialist politics in Asia. Without non-European agents and the relatively unknown interpreters, merchants, collectors, intellectuals, and artists, there would not have been any basis for transcultural exchange. Like Tagore and Tenshin they also increasingly connected with each other beyond the contexts dominated by the West. Numerous protagonists, however, remained excluded, and there were strong disparities within these movements. The US-American writer and philosopher Alain L. Locke, for example, challenged the idea that Afro-American artists should primarily represent black experience and develop an authentic black aesthetics. Instead, he emphasized each artist’s individuality and self-expression and criticized the concurrent tendency toward a ghettoization of black aesthetics that was actuated, in his view, by intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Locke’s volume The New Negro from 1925 was the cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance in New York. His educational path led him to Oxford in 1907, where he met the later founder and president of the African National Congress, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, and eventually to the University of Berlin in 1910.13 In Berlin Locke studied under the sociologist Georg Simmel and amplified his interest in value theory, which culminated in his development of “cultural relativism,”14 a scientific approach to understanding different communities of values as equivalent and in relation to each other. His “principle of cultural reciprocity”15 as part of cultural relativism promoted a neutral and tolerant stance in cultural exchange and seemed to think beyond Simmel’s Wechselwirkungen, or the reciprocal effects inherent in social dynamics. The 1950s witnessed a new wave of interest in non-European art in the West. Due to geopolitical changes, and motivated by the need to overcome the totalitarian spirit in science and art, art historians, museum curators, writers, and critics throughout Europe were eagerly engaged in a revaluation of non-Western art: this is certainly true for Paris where André Malraux celebrated the “langage universel de l’art”16; it is also true for Basel where the young Werner Schmalenbach wrote his

INTRODUCTION

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dissertation on the impact of African art on Western modernism; and it also applies to Prague where the Náprstek-Museum published its rich collection of Asian, African, and Oceanic artefacts. The German-speaking countries deserve special attention insofar as art historians such as Dagobert Frey or Karl Maria Swoboda re-animated some of the ideas of the interwar period. In 1949 Frey unfolded his theory of a comparative art history in order to illustrate the “interactive tension”17 (wechselseitiges Spannungsverhältnis) between the various art regions of the world. Karl Maria Swoboda in turn sought to expand the focus of art history at universities, changing the curricula and obliging his students to learn not just about European but also about Indian and East Asian art. These academic endeavours were accompanied by a political intention to broaden the general knowledge about Asian and African art. In 1954, for instance, the first volume of the UNESCO Sammlung der Weltkunst (UNESCO Collection of World Art) came out. This book series, initiated by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization in cooperation with the New York Graphic Society, was successful, and it was soon followed by another series on world art entitled Kunst der Welt (Art of the World ).18 This wave of publications has to be judged within a broader political framework, which once again claimed the equality of all art forms in the world — as did the simultaneous discourse on the universal language of abstraction — as a means of pacification. But it is telling that most of these books were written by Western scholars who, though constantly reflecting on the value of artistic exchanges, were obviously not very interested in collaborating with colleagues in non-European countries. As a consequence, all the above-mentioned books were written, more or less exclusively, from a Western standpoint. In Japan, encyclopaedias on world art (sekai bijutsu) embracing Asian art histories as well as a Western canon of art history from prehistory to contemporary art had been popular since the 1930s and were re-edited in the 1950s.19 Newly founded art magazines also featured art and artefacts from different times from all over the world, thus taking up the principles represented by UNESCO and the notion of reconstruction or protection of cultural heritages. Japanese artists and critics frequently used the terms for world (sekai), sekai-teki (accepted or valid worldwide) and sekai-sei (world character, globality). There was a belief that “achieving both globality (sekaisei) and humanness will constitute the basis for freedom.”20 Indeed, global entanglements were recognized as inescapable, since “the distances in the world have reduced, and from a ship on the Pacific Ocean to Tokyo, from a hotel in Tokyo to the Arabic deserts runs telecommunication. Even when we close the windows, in any form of individual life we cannot get outside the global relation (sekai kanren).”21 This global rhetoric has to be understood against the backdrop of Japan’s efforts to “catch up” not only in politics and economy but also in art, an impulse that was rooted in what Bert Winther-Tamaki has described as “artistic nationalism.”22 Although the world art historians of the 1950s knew that their work had strong political implications, surprisingly they rarely questioned the implicit power constellations of art historiography and only very seldom asked how narratives, con-

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cepts, and even practices were put to the service of ideologies. Instead, they shared the rhetoric of universal humanity, which was considered morally incontestable after the devastating experiences of the Second World War.

Transcultural Dynamics As a by-product of his 1940 study on the cultural impact of tobacco and sugar production in his country, the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation.”23 In a rather poetic historical analysis of the cultural, social, and economic impact of the two products in Cuba, he showed that their cultivation and use in the global economy had a seminal impact on Cuba’s ethnic and social composition. This essay was still strongly informed by the mestizaje discourse in Latin America that dealt with the ethnic and cultural mixing of the different people that met on the continent, namely between people of European, indigenous, and African descent. During the 1980s and early 1990s the term entered literary studies, with the Uruguayan author Ángel Rama24 and the US-American literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt25 as its most prominent exponents. The latter alluded explicitly to the selective character of transcultural collaboration, which shifted seemingly preassigned distributions of power and disclosed power asymmetries. Transculturation, according to Pratt, indicates a scope of action for subordinate societies and people who would “determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own [culture] and what it gets used for.”26 Later studies more specifically claim — again with reference to Ortiz — the need to take into account the entanglement of transculturation with violence, loss, and resistance.27 Others have defined a transcultural historiography as an approach that has to include a self-reflexive perspective and should follow the logic of agents involved in transcultural encounters as well as their movements and historical connections, rather than postulating traditional reference parameters such as culture, civilization, or nation.28 The most recent studies have revealed a teleological or even evolutionary understanding of transcultural processes that were already implicit in Ortiz’s conception of the term. 29 They are positioned, however, at a distance from the rather positivistic implications in the employment of transculturality.30 In this anthology we suggest a transcultural perspective rather than an ontology of transculturality. Conflicts, incommensurabilities, and specific forms of appropriation in transcultural exchanges are addressed in the same way as the power relations that accompany them. Case studies that historicize narratives, concepts, and practices are crucial to understanding a transcultural research approach as an engagement in processes rather than the description of specific conditions; they aim at abetting multiple perspectives. To speak of transcultural dynamics emphasizes the movements, migrations, alliances, and relations in the production of art and in the formation of art histories. Social dynamics in general examine interactions and movements of individuals as well as groups of people — that is, within groups and between groups. As a re-

INTRODUCTION

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sult, dynamics — whether merely physical, social, or cultural — stand for a comprehension of parameters initiating processes, motions, flows, circulations and, eventually, interactions that lead to specific forms of narrations, concepts, and practices. Analysing social and cultural dynamics are thus adjoined to studies on mobilities, which was a term that was coined by the sociologist John Urry.31 For Urry and his colleagues “mobility research [also] includes movements of images and information on local, national, and global media.”32 However, they as well as their supporters — such as the human geographers Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman33 — constantly point out that mobilities can only be thought of in relation to moorings, a concept that is also discussed by our colleagues Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees in their introduction to the volume The Itineraries of Art: Topographies of Artistic Mobility in Europe and Asia.34 Referring to Cresswell, Noth and Rees especially emphasize the difference between his approach and earlier binary constructions such as, for example, James Clifford’s “roots” and “routes,”35 and they write that here “movement and stasis are not considered categorical, but gradual differences.”36 These ideas of mobility and moorings, borrowed from cultural geography, as well as the dialectical process of cultural formations, the crossing and demarcations of borders,37 the de-territorialization and subsequent re-territorialization of cultural spaces are all at the core of what we consider a transcultural perspective in art history and the “overcoming of polarities.”38 A similar reassessment of the workings of objects and people in motion, which are nonetheless in connection with transcultural processes, is also made by Antje Flüchter and Jivanta Schöttli, both members of the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context at Heidelberg University. In their publication The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion they criticize the tendency in recent scholarship to merely perceive transculturality as a given, generalizing fact and the tendency to omit the concrete modalities of processes and the dynamics inherent to it.39 Instead, they ask “how transculturality occurs and whether there is any variation in the impact or in the dynamics propelling it.”40 With this, the somewhat vague idea of analysing dynamics and indeed transcultural dynamics within art historical narratives, concepts, and practices can be rendered more precisely by acknowledging not only the mechanisms of entangled constitutive processes beyond cultural fixations but also their variations, nuances, and hierarchies. According to Flüchter and Schöttli, a historicization of the chronological notion of dynamics reveals that they are conceptualized first as merely unidirectional flows and that they eventually become systems of interaction and negotiation.41Acknowledging interactions in transcultural dynamics in combination with postcolonial and gender-related approaches, however, must address power asymmetries; it has to be combined with a questioning of the contexts and power constellations in which such interactions took place. Different scopes of action must be examined just as closely as their potentially restricting frameworks. In this respect, Boaventura de Sousa Santos rightly warns us about the “reciprocity trap: the idea that the ‘others,’ as victims of [W]estern stereotypes, have the same power — because they have the same legitimacy — to construct stereotypes regarding the West.”42

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Entanglements of Narratives, Concepts, and Practices This volume traces transcultural dynamics at the intersection between narratives, concepts, and practices of art. It critically engages with the social, political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic values and hierarchies transported by Western master narratives. A particular emphasis is given to core concepts of modern and contemporary art and art historiography such as the avant-garde, the modernity of art and society, and its concomitant catchwords of authenticity and originality. In 1936, Alfred J. Barr, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presented his famous diagram of the history of abstract art for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, building a genealogy from the post-impressionists — only men — to the two strands of abstract art: non-geometrical and geometrical. This visualization became iconic for the canon of Western modern art history although it was only one part of Barr’s series of exhibitions and was followed by the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Although the diagram took non-European art into consideration, it was highlighted in red, as art’s other, together with the category machine aesthetic. Barr’s visualization only mentioned non-European art as unspecified ahistorical traditions and as a source of inspiration to Western artists — a thoroughly Eurocentric approach. Something similar occurred in 1937 when Barr organized an exhibition of rock painting in which he tried to set up a dialogue between Western avant-garde and prehistoric art from Africa and Europe; the intention was to appropriate the latter in order to pursue a diachronic history of modernism that placed Western artists, such as Jean Arp or Paul Klee, at its apex. Although responses to the Western narrative of modern art and modernism in other world regions were manifold, they had in common a heightened awareness of its rootedness in Western culture. In Japan, modernization (kindaika) began in the second half of the nineteenth century when the knowledge and the techniques of European countries and the United States were imported in order to establish the country as a modern nation state within world history. Japan’s ambitions oscillated between competing with the West and assertion of its superiority within Asia, which paved the way for the country’s growing imperialism and ultimate claim of surpassing the modern West. It was in this context that traditional arts and Western art, treated in different registers, were set against each other and that tradition was perceived as avant-garde if it offered something that was seen to surpass Western modernity.43 Notions of Japanese tradition were also revaluated by Western audiences and actually had a big impact on European and US-American architecture and design in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, under the motto of inter-nationalism, the dichotomization of Japanese tradition and Western modernity re-emerged in the reception of Japanese art. Thus, Japanese traditional cultures were seen as a resource which could be used to overcome Western modernity. In Latin America, modernity arrived as a European model for economic growth that brought with it the implied promise of turning Latin American nation states into equal counterparts. The concept was thus formed as part of a dualism whose supposed opposite was “tradition.” Néstor García Canclini was the first to question

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this dualism, and he highlighted in his seminal study Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity44 that modernity was in fact the product of interaction between different temporalities. Focusing on aesthetic issues, he also examined how modernism in Latin America was produced in the context of a colonial set of power relations and its engendered market logic, and within the ideological frameworks and philosophical accounts of modern art as coined in Europe. In the context of Latin American Subaltern Studies the concept of modernity was challenged by a focus on the coloniality of power, which identifies colonial power structures, as well as their forms of knowledge production and organization, as the constitutive factor in the state of modernity.45 The most prominent theorists within this field, Aníbal Quijano and Walter D. Mignolo, conceptualized the “colonial matrix of power” as the other, darker side of modernity, which is seen as a genuinely — and in part continuing — European narrative that persists in the present day.46 Modernity, they state, thus developed with a different vigour and potential in each region of the world. The term avant-garde refers to a historical avant-garde of Europe that formed during the late nineteenth century and to artists that transgressed the mainstream art practices that were promoted by established art institutions and art academies in particular. Instead of taking the term avant-garde as a given, shifts that occur with its application in different historical contexts have to be taken into consideration. In Japan in the late nineteenth century, European art institutions and practices were introduced during the country’s modernization efforts, and both avantgarde art as well as academic art from Europe were imported at the same time. On the one hand, negotiations with avant-garde art entailed negotiations between Japanese and European traditional and modern art; on the other, Japanese artists and art historians sojourning in Europe and the United States during the interwar years — such as Murayama Tomoyoshi in Berlin, Okamoto Tarō in Paris, as well as Mizutani Takehiko, Yamawaki Iwao and Michiko at the Bauhaus in Dessau — provided important impulses to internationalist avant-garde art movements. After returning to Japan, they retranslated these avant-garde ideas at home. In Latin America, artists who referred to themselves as avant-garde in the early twentieth century primarily sought to emancipate themselves from national or regional art production. It was only in the 1950s that artists conceptualized their avant-garde practices as being in direct opposition to European and North American art. At the same time, and in contrast to Western artists, they collaborated largely with the recently established art institutions instead of breaking with them. In Brazil, for example, museums of modern art played a major role in the development of the avant-garde. In Africa, an avant-garde movement, as such, did not occur in most countries.47 In this context, one speaks rather of avant-garde activities that were pursued by individual artists from the continent. Artists such as Ernest Mancoba left Africa for the European centres of the avant-garde: Paris, London, or Berlin. Mancoba left South Africa for Paris in 1938 and later became a founding member of the CoBrA group. The difficulty and often impossibility of connecting to avant-garde movements in Europe, especially for black artists from Africa, is exemplified by Manco-

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ba’s peripheral status within this group48 and by the neglect of his work in mainstream art historical narratives. Here, he is constructed as an authentic medium through which the European CoBrA members could make “immediate contact with African art.”49 Mancoba only actually came into contact with classic African art through the books he was able to obtain in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Cape Town in the 1930s. For white South African artists it was easier to gain access to avant-garde associations in Europe. As Isabel Wünsche points out in this volume, Irma Stern, for example, was a member of the November Group, which was a platform for artistic exchange across national borders. Walter Battiss, another artist from South Africa co-founded the New Group, which later opposed the conservatism in South African art in the late 1930s but was initially formed as a union to improve working conditions for artists. Battiss was one of the first artists in the country to develop an interest in the rock art of the San, and he developed a distinctive modernistic style with reference to their art. In Egypt, the group Art et Liberté was founded by Egyptian surrealists in 1939 as part of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, FIARI for short, which was inaugurated in Mexico at the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera one year earlier. The group promoted the liberty of expression, rejected the previous oppositional stance against art from Europe, and shared FIARI’s criticism of the reactionary cultural politics in Germany, Italy, and Spain in their manifesto Vive l’art dégénéré from 1938. Yet, apart from being open to artistic trends in Europe, artists in Egypt also reacted to the immediate social and historical situation in the country. Similar to the avant-garde in Brazil, the Egyptian surrealists did not entirely reject antecedent art production as too bourgeois. Apart from the innovative relevance of their art, they rather actuated the art scene in Cairo as part of an international network and thus countered the topos of a delayed modernity.50 Closely connected to and intersected with the different narratives, concepts, and practices of the avant-garde and modernity were the notions of authenticity and originality, which were seemingly divided into the topoi of authenticity of the other and the constantly evolving originality of European and US-American art. However, tracing transcultural encounters reveals a more complex application and appropriation of these concepts. Exploring the conceptualizations of various authenticities promises in-depth insight into transcultural phenomena, as they are highly dependent on historical contexts and transdisciplinary as well as transregional interactions. The renaissance of the concept of authenticity in recent years reflects an increasing awareness of the need to historicize anthropology and its paradigms, which used authenticity as one of its major parameters. While the concept of originality gained increasing importance in the theorization of the creative and innovative subjectivities of artists in Europe from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, the relevance of authenticity in aesthetic discourses became apparent with the autonomy of aesthetics and the subjectification of taste that was already appearing in Dominique Bouhours’ La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit from 1687.51 This autonomy, connected to a fictive agency to authenticate, was subsequently transferred

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to the figure of the artist as genius and started its inexorable march towards European modernity as well as the historical avant-garde.52 It is crucial, however, not only to mention but also to actually bring into focus that the concepts of authenticity and originality never included a linear development. On the contrary, both concepts always incurred severe criticism. Above all, the constructions and definitions of authenticity as well as originality have always also executed processes of othering and have included, and still include, attributions such as the primitive, the naïve, or the aberrant as well as specific experiences of the other such as suffering, trauma, and discrimination. These power asymmetries in the definition of different authenticities in particular, have rarely been addressed within the ambit of art.53 Since the late nineteenth century, discourses on originality and authenticity were a central paradigm in the assessment of Japanese art in relation to a Western-centric art historical narrative. Japan’s transformation project into a modern nation state and empire was considered an imitation of Western institutions and techniques. Thus, in the eyes of Western art historians, modern approaches by Japanese artists were seen as derivative while traditional arts were seen as authentically Japanese. Japanese artists and art critics were acutely aware of their peripheral position within the internationalizing art world ruled by the Euro-American centres. Their discourses and practices developed around the question of how Japanese art could achieve an “international contemporaneity” — that is, international relevance––in view of these structures either by referring to traditions or by actively engaging with the Western art movements.54 However, the judgment of imitation and the denial of originality by both Western and Japanese art criticism continued to haunt artists in Japan up to the 1970s. In Brazil, the discourse on originality was contested by the invention of the concept of cultural anthropophagy in the late 1920s. Faced with an implicit allegation of merely copying European styles and values, the poet Oswald de Andrade wrote the “Cannibalist Manifesto.”55 Drawing on the modernist primitivists’ fascination for tribal cannibalism in Latin America, Andrade used anthropophagy as a metaphor for the cultural practice of devouring the cultural baggage of all ethnic groups in the country — namely indigenous, African, and European — in order to produce something new. The concept was then taken up by artists in the early 1970s who positioned their own production against the domination of US-American mass culture. In a historical examination of Brazilian identity, the literary critic Roberto Schwarz claims that Brazilian culture possesses an inauthentic nature, as it only exists as a copy or imitation. This had led to the existence of different Brazils with various cultural backgrounds; the European oriented culture of the upper classes and the different cultural references practiced by the uneducated masses. However, Schwarz argues that copying and imitating is a value-free cultural technique that only obtained a negative connotation when it was based on the myth of creation ex nihilo. And in Brazil the negative effect is increased by the social fragmentation of Brazilian society.56 The concepts of avant-garde, modernity, originality, and authenticity as well as the artistic virtues of innovation, self-reflexivity, and criticism that trail closely be-

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hind are intertwined within the history of modern art; they remain relevant criteria of contemporary art today. Yet these concepts have led to and were formed by very different narratives and artistic practices. They were highly dependent on the propositions made by artists, art historians, and theorists and their respective position within local and global networks. The concepts have thus to be traced via the different transformative processes they undergo when entering transcultural contexts or what Mieke Bal in reference to Jonathan Culler has called “enframements.”57 Transcultural art history must take these aspects into account, and is therefore prompted to reflect on power relations and on asymmetrical, non-hegemonic constellations in art and art history at the same time. This, however, also means that art history must occasionally go beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries to cooperate with colleagues from other disciplines such as political sciences, social sciences, or economics.58 The goal of this approach is to contextualize cultural phenomena and to analyse formations of discourses and practices to create a “thick translation.”59 We therefore intend to look at the narratives, concepts, and practices at work when art is conceived, produced, presented, communicated, taught, consumed, debated, criticized, understood, misunderstood, and handed down from one generation to the next. We look at the interplays, fault lines, and conflicts between local infrastructures and discursive superstructures. And we pay special attention to the specific historical situations framing individual courses and scopes of action.

Structure of the Volume We have grouped the case studies in this volume into three blocks: narratives, concepts, and practices. First, specific emphasis will be laid upon the reconstruction of what we would like to call the alternative historiographies of modernity. Long ignored and forgotten artistic as well as art historical narratives — most often ambitious attempts to counter the still dominant master narrative of Western modernity with its experiences of exclusion — are excavated and recalled. In the following case studies, we will thus present different readings of the art of the twentieth century. Narratives Contributions in this chapter examine how and under which historical conditions historiographical narrations on art have been generated in Africa, Asia, and Europe in response to the geopolitical interventions of Western countries and their aftermath from the late nineteenth century up to the twenty-first century. The increased and often enforced mobility of people, objects, and knowledge urged artists, anthropologists, art historians, and other cultural agents to construct theories and categorizations about the art of different societies. While discursive power was distributed unequally in favour of Western travellers, protagonists in perambulated cultures developed alternative narratives and counter-narratives questioning the premises of the art historiographical paradigms dominated by the West. Cultural

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self-conceptions were and still are constantly contested and negotiated on all sides in this complex situation. The studies in this chapter outline the specific venues and media in which these negotiations took place, and they highlight the backgrounds and intentions of the respective agents. They examine terminologies as well as the models of legitimization and valorization which led to the invention of traditions, lineages, and genealogies. SHIGEMI INAGA retraces transcultural entanglements of Japanese and Chinese artists and intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century and shows how, in this constellation, considerations of Western aesthetics stimulated the revaluation and reinvention of Oriental traditions by Japanese artists and intellectuals. Thus, Inaga demonstrates the impacts of friction and (re)fracture in the processes of cultural translation and activates a perspective and agency that challenges the Eurocentrism of art historical narratives that are still virulent in the stories of cultural exchange between Japan and Europe. PAOLA IVANOV discusses the denial of coevalness for non-Euro-American peoples; that is, she explores a mode of thinking which ascribed to them an isolated position in time and space without contextualizing their artistic practices and transcultural encounters. Museum collections reflect the omission of Africa’s shared history and transcultural connectedness as well as the resulting “hybrid” objects, in favour of a fiction of “authentic” timelessness. Acknowledging and theorizing coevalness thus mirrors both the connectedness to and autonomy from Western developments. She argues that both African and European societies have been part of the same geopolitical conditions since (at least) the fifteenth century; in the nineteenth century, for example, African as well as European societies developed specific artistic reactions to structurally similar, coeval conditions, albeit with different aesthetic results. SYLVESTER OGBECHIE makes an assessment of art historiographies. Using the examples of two anthologies from South Africa and Nigeria he elaborates on the development of national narratives of modern art and the question of the relevance of art in the production of meaning and nation building. Nigerian art history has thus far tended to highlight individuals or schools, but the new book is a more comprehensive overview of Nigeria’s history and art production. It describes modern Nigerian art as being influenced by both indigenous and foreign aesthetics. Both books engage in acts of inscription, albeit under different parameters, and rewrite art history between national sensitivities and specificities as well as global interconnectedness. The fundamental question, how to write world art history without establishing new hierarchies and mechanisms of exclusion, is at the centre of MATTHEW RAMPLEY’s essay. He critically analyses the growing amount of literature on socio-biology, whose supporters causally connect biology with cultural and artistic emanations, claiming that the natural sciences can offer an explanation for the diversity of global artistic practices. Rampley convincingly points out that these ideas are deeply rooted in scientific discourses from the nineteenth century. As a consequence, he warns of widespread Neo-Darwinist approaches and the return of evolutionary theories in the field of global art history. GEORG VASOLD also looks back into the history of the discipline, but is mainly concerned with the interwar period. He examines the activities of the

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Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski and his school, who for years eagerly struggled for a general, not just academic, acceptance of world art history. Vasold traces the attempts to establish an alternative and entirely new type of art historical research by establishing a worldwide scholarly network, founding journals, and even using new media such as film and radio. This highly ambitious project, however, failed in the end, not just because of methodological contradictions, but also because of Strzygowski’s growing radical ideas and convictions. Concepts Concepts generate the specific preconditions for art historical narratives and artistic practices. They shape and are shaped by these narratives and practices; they constantly emerge anew and determine the production and reception of artistic objects; and they are penetrable and open to debates and to new encounters. In this sense, and in Mieke Bal’s sense, it is important to realize that appropriating and agreeing to artistic concepts “does not mean agreeing on content, but agreeing on the basic rules of the game: If you use a concept at all, you use it in a particular way, so that you can meaningfully disagree on content.”60 More than a specific method, the analysis of concepts thus exposes the interplay between objects and their frames of reference, between artworks and mediating agents. Disagreement, defiance, and incommensurability are the self-evident dimensions of these interplays. Apart from acknowledging a concept’s restive potency when entering transcultural contact zones, the idea of its mobility needs some attention as well. Doris Bachmann-Medick, for example, rightly asks if the displacement of concepts from Western academia to other sites — geographically or disciplinary — does actually entail a critical or even provincializing stance towards them. She objects that “the magic word ‘mobility’ is […] powerless unless the theories and concepts we work with become ‘localized.’”61 Bachmann-Medick’s plea thus brings us back to the focus of our research on transcultural dynamics and the necessity for an increasing awareness of unevenly distributed forms of agency. Our understanding of a transcultural perspective introduces concepts in their capacity as entanglements rather than freely travelling discursive entities. In this volume, authors attempt to reconstruct the emergence of concepts in both historic and present-day ambits of art as well as the underlying asymmetries of power and participation. MICHAEL ASBURY’s essay deals with the double vision of Brazilian contemporary art in the global art world. He analyses how the change of perception within the global art world in the particular case of Brazilian art does not necessarily abolish the problem of exclusion of other modern and contemporary art, but merely changes its notion and chain of arguments. Asbury uses the concept of contamination in order to investigate these changes. He argues that previously, Brazilian art was excluded from the global art world because of its supposedly derivative nature. Paradoxically, it is now exactly this nature that is highlighted as something specifically Brazilian. In her contribution MELANIE KLEIN looks at art-educational venues in

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South Africa and Uganda and therein-negotiated aesthetic concepts such as the authentic, the original, or the typically African. By tracing the application, appropriation, and transformation of these concepts in art teaching and art production by four cultural agents of African and European origin, she reveals a transcultural panorama not only in describing the relational character of such processes but also by means of consulting their circumjacent frameworks. An attentive comprehension of these frameworks is all the more important when mapping the possibilities of artistic agency. The practice of artistic fakes and fictional projects as a way of dealing with the questions of originality and authenticity that are implicit in Western expectations of art from Africa is addressed by TOBIAS WENDL. He presents a series of meticulous case studies of contemporary artists’ practices from different African countries. This contribution traces how these artists position themselves in a global art world that is still based on the Western concepts and expectations of local markers of identification, and how the artist uses these concepts and sometimes transforms its connotations. Wendl identifies approaches to Africanness that range from using it as a creative repository to being strategically non-committal about attributions such as African, post-ethnic, or even global. PARTHA MITTER’s essay draws on the concept of modernity and its relation to non-Western art practices. He elaborates on the complex and multifaceted reasons for an increasing cultural exchange between India and especially Germany in the 1920s, and acknowledges both the authority of the Western modernist canon as well as the Indian artists who resolved this dominance with their own artistic solutions. He claims a decentred and provincializing view on modernisms in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense and thus the relevance (and necessity — reacting to James Elkins’ recent denial of such) of non-Western contributions to a global modernism. With the example of primitivism as a social critique of modernity, Mitter draws analogies between similar discourses in India and Europe. Even if there were no formal affinities, Mitter nevertheless develops the idea of structural affinity between these critical impulses as a common stance against the pitfalls of modernity. Using primitivism as a weapon for colonized people and as a way of returning the Western gaze, however, differed thoroughly from the intellectual objectives in Europe. Practices The essays assembled in this chapter focus on the interstice between artists and objects. Artists have always been challenged and inspired by past and present material cultures and artistic traditions from all over the world. The authors in this section treat the question of how artists deal with their actual or imaginary, theoretical or cultural mobility and versatility and how this condenses in artistic objects. They trace the different ways of relating to objects that are dependent on the place of articulation and on the cultural context that manifests in artists’ practices and eventual artworks. In order to escape or to overcome the incorporation into hegemonic narratives and academic categorizations, many artists developed new ways of coping with these often ethnically, nationally, or culturally connoted as-

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criptions. Highly aware of the modes and effects of how their artworks were presented and discussed, they took up a position against existing art historical narratives or produced their own, claiming self-explanatory validity for their works. The essays disclose that the artists’ oeuvres often released ambiguous interpretative frameworks to contemporaneous and later audiences that were challenging established art historical narratives and categories. They reveal the ways in which the correspondent reception rather depended and continues to depend on the distribution of political, economic, social, and discursive power. PAULINE BACHMANN examines the intersection of visual art and poetry in the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement (1959–1961). She argues that the collaborative practice of poets and visual artists changed the notion of constructivist thought and opened it up to the production of haptic and body-focused artworks. The book as a tactile object and container of language plays a central role in this. Closely exploring Lygia Pape’s and Ferreira Gullar’s experiments, her essay also presents a counter-narrative to the construction of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica as the founders of body-centred art in Brazil. BIRGIT HOPFENER’s contribution deals with interventionist and socially engaged art in China today, focusing on Qiu Zhijie’s project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (2008–) and his theoretical reflections on Total Art. Hopfener argues that this concept has been transculturally engendered as a critique of the dualist thinking between art and life. This dualism is conceived as both the result of Western epistemology as well as Chinese social and cultural histories, which are in turn based on traditions of thought, such as Neo-Confucianism, and their concepts of the relationship between individual self, society, and history. She thus discloses the pitfalls of art historical assumptions about the relationship between criticism and interventionist art. TOMOKO MAMINE examines the challenges Murakami Saburō’s work 6 Holes (1955) poses to art historical categorization and contextualization. She demonstrates that Murakami’s 6 Holes, widely perceived as iconic for the activities of the Japanese artist group Gutai Art Association (1954–1972), defies all attempts of unequivocal determination through art historical and cultural framings and categories. The extent to which Western art historical narratives were discussed and critically adopted in China in the mid-1930s in order to re-evaluate their own artistic tradition, is explored by JULIANE NOTH. By taking a comparative look at European and Chinese art histories, Noth demonstrates how in Shanghai a handful of prominent painters sought to overcome the “crisis” and “morbidity” of Chinese contemporary art and culture. This happened at a politically precarious moment when, due to the Japanese military expansion in China, a renewed interest in traditionalist art occurred. For the Shanghai painters, European — in particular, French — art theories on impressionism and the discourse on classicism versus naturalism was a welcome means with which to revalue domestic landscape painting traditions. However, this did not happen on a purely theoretical level but also had consequences for artistic practices, since in 1930s China outdoor sketching was increasingly perceived as the hallmark of modern painting practice. ISABEL WÜNSCHE’s contribution is a call for the revision of the history of Western modernity and a plea for the enlargement of the

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geography of modern art. Instead of focusing on Paris and New York as the artistic centres of the avant-garde, Wünsche reminds us of the complex cultural and political situation of interwar Berlin and the role that the (now less known) November Group played in it. Far from being a homogenous art collective, the November Group was a platform of exchange for artists from various national and cultural backgrounds who represented a variety of stylistic orientations and artistic expressions. For the members of this group, who came for the most part from Eastern Europe, the basic idea of modern art lay in the intention to overcome national(istic) paradigms and discourses. Thus, the artistic and political agenda of the November Group aimed at defending the idea of crossing borders and of transgressing boundaries.

Notes 1 Arthur von Scala, “Vorwort” in Orientalische Teppiche, ed. K. K. Oesterreichisches Handelsmuseum (Vienna: Reisser, 1892), n. p. 2 See, for example, Rudolf von Scala, Über die wichtigsten Beziehungen des Orientes zum Occidente in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Vienna: Verlag des Orientalischen Museums, 1887). 3 Oskar Beyer, Welt-Kunst: Von der Umwertung der Kunstgeschichte (Dresden: Sybillen-Verlag, 1923), 11. 4 See, for instance, Max Dvořák, “Über die dringendsten methodischen Erfordernisse der Erziehung zur kunstgeschichtlichen Forschung,” Die Geisteswissenschaften 34 (21 May 1914), 932– 936. 5 Beyer, Welt-Kunst (cf. note 3), 14. 6 Josef Strzygowski, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften: Vorgeführt am Beispiel der Forschung über bildende Kunst (Vienna: Schroll, 1923), VI. 7 Michel Espagne, “Cultural Transfers in Art History” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 97–112, here 107. 8 Julius Schlosser, Präludien. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1927), 9 and 36. 9 Ibid., 39: “Der Vorgang ist typisch für die Art, wie alte, scheinbar längst überlebte und beiseite geworfene Formen, bei einer oft zufällig herbeigeführten Anpassung an einen neuen Gedanken, neues und kräftigeres Leben als vorher zu entfalten imstande ist; er ist aber auch typisch für die Entwicklung der Formen überhaupt.” 10 Saloni Mathur, ed., The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (London: Yale Univ. Press, 2011); Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, ed., Die Kunst der Migration. Aktuelle Positionen zum europäisch-afrikanischen Diskurs (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); Joaquín Barriendos, Geoestética y Transculturalidad (Barcelona: Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani, 2007); DaCosta Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, Circulations (cf. note 7). 11 Espagne, “Cultural Transfers” (cf. note 7), 107. 12 See, for example, Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). 13 See, for example, Pamela Roberts, Black Oxford: The Untold Stories of Oxford University’s Black Scholars (Oxford: Signal Books Limited, 2013). 14 Alain LeRoy Locke, “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace” in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989), 69–78. 15 Ibid., 73. Here, Locke writes: “The principle of cultural reciprocity, which, by a general recognition of the reciprocal character of all contacts between cultures and of the fact that all modern cultures are highly composite ones, would invalidate the lump estimating of cultures in terms of generalized, en bloc assumptions of superiority and inferiority ….”

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16 Cited after: Claudia Bahmer, Weltkunst: Formpsychologie und Kulturanthropologie in André Malraux’ Kunstschriften (Berlin: Kadmos, 2006), 21. 17 Dagobert Frey, Grundlegung zu einer vergleichenden Kunstwissenschaft. Raum und Zeit in der Kunst der afrikanisch-eurasischen Hochkulturen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970 [1949]), 5. 18 Kunst der Welt consisted of 51 volumes (of which 21 were dedicated to non-Western art) and aimed at analysing all the cultures of the world, in their historic, sociological, and religious foundations. 19 Ginjirō Ogawa et al., eds., Sekai bijutsushi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1905); Yasaburō Shimonaka, ed., Sekai bijutsu zenshū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1927–1930, 1930–1932, 1950–1955). 20 Masao Ōguchi, “Henshū kōki [Editor’s Note],” Sekai bijutsu 1 (1947), 128. 21 Sōichi Tominaga, “Sekai bijutsu no kōsei [The Formation of World Art],” Atorie 255 (1948), 34–36. 22 Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 23 Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002 [1940]). 24 Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (México City: Siglo XXI, 1982). 25 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991), 33–40. 26 Ibid., 36. 27 See, for example, Mark Millington, “Transculturation: Taking Stock” in Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America, ed. Felipe Hernández, Mark Millington, and Iain Borden (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 204–233. 28 See Almut Höfert, “Anmerkungen zum Konzept einer ‘transkulturellen’ Geschichte in der deutschsprachigen Forschung,” Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 18 (2008), 15–26; Monica Juneja, “Kunstgeschichte und kulturelle Differenz,” Kritische Berichte 40/2 (2012), 6–12. 29 Wolfgang Gippert, Petra Götte, and Elke Kleinau, eds., Transkulturalität. Gender- und bildungshistorische Perspektiven (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008); Dorothee Kimmich and Schamma Schahadat, eds., Kulturen in Bewegung, Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis der Transkulturalität (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012); Michael Falser and Monica Juneja, eds., Kulturerbe und Denkmalpflege transkulturell. Grenzgänge zwischen Theorie und Praxis (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013); Jutta Ernst and Florian Freitag, eds., Transkulturelle Dynamiken. Aktanten – Prozesse – Theorien (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014); Alexandra Millner and Katalin Teller, eds., Transdifferenz und Transkulturalität, Migration und Alterität in den Literaturen und Kulturen Österreich-Ungarns (Bielefeld: Transcript, forthcoming). 30 Wolfgang Welsch, “Transkulturalität. Zur veränderten Verfassung heutiger Kulturen” in Hybridkultur: Medien, Netze, Künste, ed. Irmela Schneider and Christian W. Thomson (Cologne: Wienand, 1997), 67–90. 31 John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2000). 32 Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities 1/1 (2006), 1–22, here 11. 33 Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 34 Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth, and Joachim Rees, eds., The Itineraries of Art: Topographies of Artistic Mobility in Europe and Asia (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), see in particular the introduction on pp. 9–32. 35 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997). 36 Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees, “Introduction” in The Itineraries of Art, ed. Gludovatz, Noth, and Rees (cf. note 34), 14. 37 Birgit Mersmann, “Bildkulturwissenschaft als Kulturbildwissenschaft. Von der Notwendigkeit eines inter- und transkulturellen Iconic Turn,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 49/1 (2004), 91–109. 38 Juneja, “Kunstgeschichte und kulturelle Differenz” (cf. note 28), 11, our translation of “Transzendierung des Gegensatzes.”

INTRODUCTION

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39 See Antje Flüchter and Jivanta Schöttli, “Introduction” in The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion, ed. Antje Flüchter and Jivanta Schöttli (Cham: Springer, 2015), 1–23. 40 Ibid., 2. 41 Ibid., 8. 42 Boaventura De Sousa Santos, “A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge,” Theory Culture Society 26/7–8 (2009), 103–125, here 105. 43 Karatani Kōjin, “Japan as Art Museum: Okakura and Fenollosa” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 43–52; Shigemi Inaga, “The Impossible Avant-Garde in Japan, Does the Avant-Garde Exist in the Third World? Japan’s Example: A Borderline Case of Misunderstanding in Aesthetic Intercultural Exchange,” doxa (2010), 82–89. 44 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995) [first published as Culturas Híbridas. Estratégias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1989)]. 45 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views From the South 1/3 (2000), 533–580. 46 Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity” in Modernologies. Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism, ed. Sabine Breitwieser, exhibition catalogue Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 2009), 39–49. 47 Elizabeth Harney, though, determines an avant-garde movement in Senegal in the 1970s as being in direct opposition to the restrictions of Léopold Senghor’s cultural politics of Négritude. See Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004). 48 Mancoba is quoted in an interview: “The embarrassment that my presence caused to the point of making me, in their eyes, some sort of ‘Invisible Man’ or merely the consort of a European woman artist — was understandable, as before me there had never been to my knowledge any black man taking part in the visual arts ‘avant garde’ of the Western World.” Drawings and Paintings from the Studio: Ernest Mancoba, ed. Michael Stevenson Gallery (Cape Town: Michael Stevenson Gallery, 2014), 59. 49 Willemijn Stokvis, CoBrA: The Last Avant-Garde Movement in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004). For a deeper analysis, see also Laura M. Smalligan, “The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba: Africa and Europe at the Crossroads,” Third Text 24 (2010), 263–276. 50 See Adel el-Siwi, “The Egyptian Surrealists: A Contemporary Egyptian Artist’s Perspective,” presentation at the conference The Egyptian Surrealists in Global Perspective, Cairo, 26–28 November 2015. At this conference, the problem of labelling Egyptian art production with art historical categories developed in the West, namely surrealism, was also critically addressed. 51 Dominique Bouhours, La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit (Brighton: Univ. of Sussex Library for the Committee for Research in French Studies, 1971). 52 See Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde. Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2015). 53 They have received some critical attention in anthropological studies. For the latest anthology see Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Thomas Fillitz and Jamie Saris (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). They, as well as Regina Bendix in her volume In Search for Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997), argue for analyses that address the connection of politics of authenticity with market forces. 54 Reiko Tomii, “‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” Japan Review 21 (2009), 123–147; Ming Tiampo, “Originality, Universality, and Other Modernist Myths: A Response to the 2007 Stone Summer Theory Institute Seminars” in Art and Globalization, ed. James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice S. Kim (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 166–170. 55 Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” Latin American Literary Review 19/38 (1991), 38–47 [first published in Portuguese in 1928]. 56 Roberto Schwarz, “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination” in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (New York: Verso, 1992), 1–17.

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57 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73/2 (June 1991), 174–208, here 180. 58 Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism. Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna in Conversation” in Transcultural Modernisms, ed. Fahim Amir et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 22–33. 59 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Thick Translation,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 16/4 (1993), 808–819. With his concept of a thick translation, Kwame Anthony Appiah differentiates between the production of meaning through a mere translation of a text and an attempt to facilitate its understanding through contextualizing the initial text. 60 Mieke Bal, “Working with Concepts,” European Journal of English Studies 13/1 (2009), 13–23, here 18. 61 Doris Bachmann-Medick, “From Hybridity to Translation: Reflections on Travelling Concepts” in The Trans/national Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective, ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 119–136, here 121.

I. NARRATIVES

SHIGEMI INAGA

Western Modern Masters Measured on the East-Asian Literati Template Hashimoto Kansetsu and the Kyoto School of Sinology The initial title of the conference Questioning Narratives and Negotiating Frameworks describes precisely the challenges that painters in East Asia were confronting during the first half of the twentieth century in connection with “transcultural dynamics.”1 In this paper, we shall examine the case of Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本 関雪 (1883–1945), an important Nanga 南画 Southern School-style painter in Kyoto, who strove to rehabilitate the Chinese literati tradition in modern Japan in order to enhance the importance of “Oriental painting” (tōyō kaiga 東洋絵画) in the global perspective of the day (fig. 1).2 This paper pays particular attention to the ways in which the Western aesthetic perception stimulated a modern re-evaluation (or even a new re-invention) of the Oriental tradition. Central to this topic is the rehabilitation of the classical notion of qiyung shengdong 氣韻生動 in relation or as a reaction to Western Expressionismus.3 Modern transnational and transcultural exchanges have often contributed to rediscoveries of the past. The Japanese interest in the Ming-Qing 明清 literati eccentrics (newly introduced to Japan by the so-called leftover subjects and merchants of the Qing Dynasty) around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, coincides with the Chinese rediscovery of the Song-Yuan 宋元 old master painting of Chang/Zen 禅 Buddhist tradition (well known in Japan thanks to ancient collections, but not easily accessible in China). One vital factor in this mutual recognition was the Republican Revolution 辛亥革命 in 1911, which put an end to the Qing Dynasty. But how did the gap between Chinese and Japanese perceptions of the Oriental tradition stimulate intellectual dialogues in aesthetic terms?4 Hashimoto Kansetsu played a pivotal role in these questions.5 Indeed, his work, as well as his ideology, truly embodies the notion of “questioning narratives and negotiating frameworks” for the entirety of world art history.6

The Rehabilitation of Late-Ming/Early-Qing Painting in Japan Kansetsu’s contact with Western modernism and his stay in Europe in 1922 produced many works of new invention: The Story of Guo Ju (郭巨) (fig. 2), created shortly before his trip in 1919, suggests a triptych in which the conventional “Oriental” didactic subject matter of Confucian “Filial Piety” is syncretized with the Christian iconography of the Holy Family.7 Both his Fairy Woman (僊女) (1926)

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Fig. 1: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪 in front of Mokuran/Mulan 木蘭 (1918), c. 1918

Fig. 2: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Story of Guo Ju 郭巨, from Twenty Four Paragons of Filial Piety 二四孝, 1919, 188.5 × 66.8–44.5 cm, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

(fig. 3, pl. I) and his Visiting the Hermit (訪隠) (1930) (fig. 4, pl. II) are, surprisingly, based on Persian miniatures (although this has not been noticed until now).8 And Examining the Bull (相牛) (1925) (fig. 5) may be a reference to the prehistoric drawing of a bison in the Altamira cave. With these works, Kansetsu was not just searching for an East-West synthesis, he was also aiming at a methodological “anachronism” which would allow him to renovate art through the oldest images made by the human species.9 Yet this contact with Western culture––unexpected not only for the Asian audience of Kansetsu’s own day, but also for a Western one today––was counterbalanced by his frequent trips to China. One of the Chinese intellectuals and artists who first made his acquaintance was Qian Shoutie 銭痩鐡 (1897–1967), whom

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Fig. 3: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Fairy Woman 僊女, 1926, 280 × 171 cm, Ōtani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City

Fig. 4: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Visiting the Hermit 訪隠, 1930, 221 × 176 cm, Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi City

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Fig. 5: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Examining the Bull 相牛, 1925, 167.8 × 270 cm, private collection

Kansetsu first met probably in 1922 when he stayed in Shanghai. The following year, he also met Wu Changshi 呉昌碩 (1844–1927), a great literati artist who wished to come to Japan, but was prevented from realizing his project by his opium addiction.10 Qian was invited to Kansetsu’s Kyoto residence (1923–1924), and while staying there he made many stone seals engravings 篆刻 that were subsequently coveted by Japanese amateurs, including painters, writers, and businessmen.11 Kansetsu also befriended Wan Yiting 王一亭 (1867–1938), a literati painter and prominent figure in the Shanghai business world, who also partly served as the art market dealer and business representative of Wu Changshi.12 Earlier, the famous literati artist Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940)––together with Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1922), one of the leading political figures of the reform movement at the end of the Qing Dynasty––came to Japan as an exile in 1911. Although Wang left Japan in 1916, Luo stayed on in Kyoto until 1919, and both frequented the Kyoto sinologists circle, which included Nagao Uzan 長尾雨山 (1868–1942), a master in Chinese poetry and a business consultant who stayed frequently in Shanghai; Inukai Tsuyoshi 犬養毅 (1855–1932), a renowned statesman who would be appointed prime minister in 1932; Naitō Konan 内藤湖南 (1866–1934), a leading journalist, heading the Kyoto School of Sinology; and the Shintō priest and distinguished Southern School painter, Tomioka Tessai 富岡鉄斎 (1837–1924) (fig. 6).13 Kansetsu is outspoken on the merits and the limits of his contemporaries. On Wu Changshi, for instance, he did not hesitate to state that

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Fig. 6: Luo Zhenyu / Ra Shingyoku 羅振玉 with his friends in Kyoto at his farewell party, 1919 (From left to right: Nagao Uzan 長尾雨山, Inukai Tsuyoshi 犬養毅, Luo, Tomioka Tessai 富岡鉄斎, Naitō Konan 内藤湖南)

Wu’s talent as a painter can hardly be compared with that of old venerable Tessai. Yet Wu excels in composing poetry. Of course his seal engraving marks his best, seconded by his poetry, then comes his painting in the third place. His poetry is full of suppleness, which is rare among the contemporary Chinese. It is true the reverent old Tessai did some poetry, but the quality of his poetry was so childish that it does not deserve any serious attention.14

Why was Kansetsu capable of delivering such audacious judgments? In answer to this question it is perhaps worth mentioning here that his father was the famous Confucian scholar Kaikan 海関 (1852–1935). Not only was the Confucian tradition and literati Chinese culture transmitted from father to son, Kaikan’s residence was frequented by many Chinese Qin Dynasty “leftovers” (i.e. loyalists to the fallen dynasty) and important persons (including a future prime minister of the Manchuguo-Manshūkoku 満洲國),15 even before the Republican Revolution in 1911. Kansetsu was thus in the privileged position of being able to absorb the latest information and knowledge coming from China. His friendship with the Chinese literati is another important factor that can help us to understand the socio-historical position Kansetsu was to assume in the Taishō era (1911–1925) as a core figure of the nexus of “interrelatedness” in international contexts.16

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Fig. 7: Shitao 石濤, Scroll of the Yellow Mountain 黄山図巻, 1699, 28.7 × 182.1 cm, Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Kyoto

Since the Republican Revolution, the Chinese “leftovers” had been busy doing business with Japanese collectors. Wu Changshi not only sold his own collections in Japan to earn money that would ensure the survival of his family, but it is well known that he also worked as an expert and connoisseur (even selling works which were later revealed to be fakes). At the end of the First World War, interactions between Japan and China had intensified, and major modern collections of Chinese art were established in the Kansai region.17 When the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 devastated the Tokyo and Yokohama area, several leading heads of huge trusts and financial combines 財閥 moved to the Kansai area, temporarily at least, where they further promoted an atmosphere of so-called Sino-philia 支那趣味.18 A rehabilitation of literati culture was now on the agenda, and as an artist of high standing, reputed furthermore to be a man of breeding, culture, and exceptional erudition, Kansetsu became one of the key players in this new era. The Chinese contemporary literati taste was based mainly on the high value it placed on the works of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Previously, Japan lacked authentic collections from this period (although the names of artists and woodblock copies were known). Japanese amateurs preferred old imported works from the Song and Yuan Dynasties and paintings by the Zen Buddhist masters, which were treasured as valued cultural heritage since the Ashikaga period and continue to be transmitted from one generation to the next in the present day. Thus, most of the Japanese collectors and amateurs were not yet ready to appreciate and judge the newly imported Ming and Qing masters.19 The new generation’s shift in appreciation for Chinese literati art, coincided in Japan with the vogue for post-impressionism (discussed in the 1910s in the pages of the literary monthly Shirakaba) as well as expressionism, which was already known in Japan around 1910, but was not directly connected with the Ming-Qing Chinese literati taste until the end of the First World War by intellectuals in Japan.20 Kansetsu interpreted the overlapping of the two vogues in the following way:

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From the end of Ming to the early Qing period, one can remark the emergence of a similar tendency to that which has recently happened in Europe with a van Gogh, a Gauguin, or such Fauves as a Matisse, a Derain or a Vlaminck today. That is, the “Flux of Life,” including even the ugly and the evil, expresses the crude and proper human nature so faithfully to one’s inner desire, that it replaces the classical Qiyun Shengdong 氣韻生動 (vital rhythm and life movement). It is quite evident that the same path is also followed in Europe up to the present day. … I beg those who worship the Western Art to understand that the same movement has been observed already two hundred years earlier in the Orient.21

In addition to this highly ideological statement of Sino-centrism, in a text written in 1924 Kansetsu also disdainfully mocked the scholars of the Kyoto school of Sinology: Recently I heard that a certain sinologist began to lecture the record of Shitao’s oral remarks on Painting 画語録. Not only lecturing it in a public space (as a lecturer) but also listening to it (as an audience) would be a pitiful pain, for his writing is like a Zen masters’ utterances 禅語, which you cannot grasp unless you share the same mind-set as the one in the artist’s mind and heart.22

Who was the target of Kansetsu’s diatribe? Naitō Konan had given a public lecture on the Qing painting in 1915, and Tomioka Kenzō 富岡謙蔵 (1873–1918), son of the painter Tessai, gave a lecture on the early Qing painter in a summer school in 1918. The latter was followed by his publication of Four Wangs, Wu and Yun (四王 呉惲) in 1919, which summarized the greatest painters of the period. In 1921, Aoki Masaru 青木正児 (1887–1964) published “The Painting and Painting Treatise of Shitao,”23 and Ise Sen’ichirō 伊勢専一郎 (1887–1948), in his turn, published Chinese Painting in 1922.24 Although it is not easy to pinpoint Kansetsu’s target, the circumstances reveal the level of interest in late-Ming/early-Qing paintings by Japanese contemporary scholars in Kyoto. What also becomes clear in this dispute with

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Fig. 8: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, cover and title page of Shitao / Seki Tō 石濤, 1925

the core of the Kyoto academic world is that Kansetsu was publicly manifesting a complicated polemical stance in claim of his own priority. Indeed, Kyoto Imperial University was located within walking distance of his own residence. As a painter Kansetsu had several reasons to criticize errors in the conventional scholarly understanding of Chinese painting in Japan as well as to make a diagnosis of current tendencies. In terms of technical practice, Kansetsu gave many useful tips in the second part of Passage to the Southern School Painting (南画への道程) (1924). In this book, among many other aspects, he pointed out the confusion in Japan around the distinction between hatsuboku 溌墨 (pōmò in Chinese) and haboku 破墨 (pòmù in Chinese). He claimed that the so-called haboku landscape by Sesshū 雪舟, or Sesson 雪村 in Japan, should be renamed hatsuboku as it was in China, and declared that, contrary to the current misunderstanding in Japan, “the Southern School makes frequent use of haboku, while the Northern School often relies upon hatsuboku.”25 Kansetsu’s claim of authenticity for all things Chinese was inseparable from his anti-authoritarian stance and his stubborn spirit of independence. Shitao 石濤 occupied one of the main positions in the modern rehabilitation and revival of the Southern School of painting in Japan.26 Some of the representative masterpieces by Shitao, such as the Scroll of the Yellow Mountain (黄山図 鑑) (1699) and Viewing Waterfall in Lushan (廬山観瀑図), were accessible in the Sumitomo Sen-oku Hakukokan 住友泉屋博古館 Collection in Kyoto (fig. 7, pl. III). In his 1926 book on Shitao, Kansetsu proudly published reproductions of

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Fig. 9: Shitao 石濤, Album of the Mountains and Water 山水画冊, former Hashimoto Kansetsu collection, frontispiece of Passage to the Southern School of Painting 南画への道程, 1924

some of Shitao’s works from his own collection (fig. 8). Kansetsu personally felt some reserve towards Shitao (for whom he could not help feeling some “repulsion”), and expressed a preference for Jīn Dōngxīn (Kansetsu uses this name), otherwise known as Jīn Nóng 金冬心/金農 (1687–1763), whose preference for keeping Western dogs as pets he imitated.27 Yet Shitao’s landscape seems to have deeply impressed Murakami Kagaku 村上華岳 (1888–1939),28 who was a member of the Society for the Creation of National Painting (Kokuga sōsaku kyōkai 国画創作 協会) in Kyoto, which had close but not yet fully explored connections with Kansetsu. Kansetsu’s remark in another essay shows his strategic use of Shitao. As an example of the basic difference between the East and the West, he draws attention to the rendering of the sky: “I strongly felt that in the Western landscapes the colour of the sky is the most important; without which the painting cannot stand. Whereas in China, the colour of the sky is not that important, except in such singular cases where the wind and the rain are to be expressed.”29 For the frontispiece of his book on Shitao, Kansetsu specifically chose a rare rainy scene from Shitao’s Album of the Mountains and Water (山水画冊) (fig. 9). The Chinese painter renders the effect of the driving rain covering the entire scene and applies diagonal misty brushstrokes for the streaks of pouring rain. Exceptionally, the sky plays a decisive role here, so that “the wind and the rain are to be expressed.” Kansetsu’s tactful selection is

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clearly connected with his diagnostics: Shitao’s piece from his collection at once justifies his dichotomist view of the East and the West and also accounts for his placing so much importance on Shitao. In other words, the Shitao piece he cherished could compete with Western master paintings because of its exceptional emphasis on the sky effect.

Eastern Ming-Qing Masters Confronted with the Western Modern Masters The comparison between the Chinese Ming-Qing masters and the Western modern painters was a necessary operation for the effective mapping of the cartography of the world history of painting. For Kansetsu, “questioning narratives” meant associating Western art history with that of the Chinese register; and “negotiating frameworks” meant placing Western masters on an equal footing with Chinese ones. Or more precisely, it was not the Western standard but the Chinese criteria that served as the template. The West, from this perspective, occupied a subordinate position in the progressive, chronological hierarchy of art history according to Kansetsu’s (ideological and “Oriental”) beliefs, since Ming-Qing China preceded Western impressionism and post-impressionism by two centuries.30 Following this guideline, Kansetsu compares Cézanne to Wang Hui 王翬 (Wang Shigu 王石谷, 1632–1717): Cézanne should be likened to Wang Shigu. Some people hate Wang as they prefer old archaic expressions. Yet his scale and the complexity cannot be fully appreciated through a mere superficial observation of a limited number of his pieces. His multi-layered life, full of ups and downs, gave many suggestions as well as influences to his posterity. Nobody can deny it. For this reason, one cannot help comparing him with Cézanne in the West.31

Likewise, Renoir was juxtaposed with Yun Shouping 惲壽平 (Yun Nantian 惲南田, 1633–1690): “The flowers and birds by Nantian are rendered with such graceful lines which are full of subtle elegance. One may presume that these lines have something in common with the colour rhythms of Renoir.”32 As for Vincent van Gogh, Kansetsu does not hesitate to link him to Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬 (Chen Laolian 陳老蓮, 1598–1652): “Van Gogh is to be compared to Chen Hongshou. He looks pure and vulgar, eccentric but just. His picture is tinted with lofty archaic tones and yet realistic in its perception. Chen’s world is a sort of abnormal. His individuality is at times so violent that his works look almost pathological. This is why one is led to put him in proximity of Van Gogh.”33 Furthermore, Kansetsu links Gauguin to Bada Shanren 八大山人 (1625?–1705?) “because of his singular sentiment and primitive expression” and “Le Douanier” or Henri Rousseau to Jīn Nóng “for both of them share a naiveté and use the human affairs of their surrounding neighbourhood as their favourite subject matter.”34 In

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conclusion, Kansetsu declares, “when I look at the painting by the post-impressionists, I recognize there the taste of the Southern School tinted with (Western) vivid colours. People with clear insight should certainly see, beneath the surface, a potential of ‘Life’ 生命 which both of them secretly share in common.”35 Previously, Kansetsu had published Passage to the Southern School of Painting 南画への道程 (1924). From the outset in this illustrated book, Kansetsu dogmatically pointed out the belatedness of Western art history in comparison with its East-Asian counterpart. The delayed recognition of a Henri Rousseau or a Vincent Van Gogh in the West served as his proof: “If a Douanier Rousseau or a Van Gogh were born in the East, their true artistic value should have been recognized earlier, even during their life time.”36 This self-assertive conviction was based on a stereotypical contrast that he believed to be relevant when drawing the distinction between East and West––he insisted upon the superiority of lofty Oriental spirituality vis-à-vis crude Western materiality.37 Although his cultural determinism appears schematic, it turns out to have been extremely relevant for the East-Asian international milieu in the 1920s, as we shall see: It is inevitable that the Westerners cannot get rid of their materialist ideas and are confined in the limit of reasons and sciences as they are caught in their strong tradition. Whereas the spirit of the Oriental painting takes a particular position in that it can reach the truth without searching for the formal resemblance, without any refinement of scientific substances.38

Yet Kansetsu cannot help mystifying Oriental spirituality for lack of easy and methodical access to its ideal. “The [O]riental Art is the field (天地: ‘heaven and earth’) accessible only to those who are talented to grasp freely the symbols reflected by the wisdom of imagination; it is the logic of the world of dreams contained in the suggestive resonances.”39 Again, Kansetsu’s idealization of Oriental spiritualty goes hand-in-hand with his notion of the chronological priority of Oriental aesthetics: The idealistic movement, which has become recently prominent in Europe, is nothing new in the East as a vision. Expressionists claim that it is only after its birth that Art could discover a new method for its manifestation, but this statement reveals their lack in serious search of the Oriental tradition; as I have already stated elsewhere, Expressionism stems from the subjective depiction of the Orientals and [was] practiced much earlier in the East.40

It is tempting to suggest that Kansetsu’s almost obstinate insistence on Oriental spiritual superiority is nothing more than the result of a hidden and subconscious inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West, which he denied. Regardless, it is clear that in both the West and Japan, the painter could not help feeling a strong resentment of the general lack of understanding for the East-Asian literati painting tradition. Yet his self-righteous indignation about this lack of comprehension turns out to have been in tune with the frustration that contemporary Chinese intellectuals in the Republican era felt toward the overwhelming impact of Western culture.

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Among the positive Chinese reaction to Kansetsu’s discourse, I shall single out the case of Feng Zikai 豊子愷 (1898–1975).41

From Kansetsu to Feng Zikai: The Migrating Narrative of Qiyun Shengdong Feng Zikai, who later became one of the representative figures in Shanghai modernism, stayed in Japan for ten months in 1921 as a young man. As he later recalled, Japan was not the destination per se but was recognized as the show-window through which to observe the whole world (meaning the West, after the end of the First World War). Upon his return to Shanghai, Feng, now a schoolmaster, became preoccupied with the introduction of Western art and music as a modernizing force in China. In the years that followed, Feng become a famous cartoonist and was distinguished as one of the area’s leading essayists. Although he was prolific in his publications, I will mention here only a single influential article: “The Triumph of The Chinese Fine Art in the World of Art Today” (中国美術在現代藝術上的勝利), which Feng published as the opening article of the January special issue of the Oriental Review (東方雑誌) (1930).42 At the beginning of this paper, Feng confirmed, on the one hand, that modern Western art was strongly influenced by the Orient and that Chinese art was now occupying a leading position in world art. As proof, Feng pointed out the similarity between Wassily Kandinsky’s art theory, developed in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), and that of Qi-yun Shendong-Dong 気韻生動 pronounced by Xie He 謝赫 (479–502) during the Six Dynasties period. For his argument, Feng relied upon Psychology of Artistic Creation 藝術創作の心理 (1922) by Sono Raizō 園頼 三 (1891–1973), a Japanese scholar in aesthetics at the Dôshisha University in Kyoto, who was also the Japanese translator of Wassily Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Feng also stated that the modern Western aesthetic idea of “Einfühlung,” which was advanced and elaborated by Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) and Johannes Volkert (1848–1930), had already been surpassed by the Chinese “Vital rhythm and life movement” 1400 years earlier. Feng also referred to a study by another young scholar in the field of sinology, Ise Sen’ichirō’s 伊勢専一郎 (1891– 1948) Chinese Painting 支那の絵画 (1922). One wonders why Feng felt the need to refer to contemporary Japanese scholarship, but the following observation may provide an answer to this question. In order to justify his emphasis that Chinese painting is the parent of Japanese painting, and that Japanese painting is merely an adjunct offshoot of the Chinese main current, Feng relied not only upon Ise Sen’ichirō’s books but also quoted from the History of Chinese Painting 支那絵画 史 (1913) written by Nakamura Fusetsu 中村不折 (1886–1943) and Oga Seiun 小鹿青雲 (1876–?).43 These demonstrations allowed Feng Zikai to sustain the idea of Oriental superiority over the Occident in terms of fine arts and aesthetic theory. For the confirmation of this logical conclusion, Feng also mentioned Kinbara Seigo’s 金原省吾

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(1888–1958) writings, which were later integrated into Kinbara’s Studies in Oriental Arts 東洋美術論叢 (1934). However, hidden among these numerous references to Japanese contemporary literature, the most decisive phrase in Feng’s entire text was borrowed from Hashimoto Kansetsu. In the concluding part of the paper, Feng triumphantly declared the following: The Westerners’ thought is a prisoner of their materialist ideas and they cannot go beyond the limit of reasons and sciences. In contrast, the spirit of the Oriental painting does not care about the refinement of scientific substances and does not search for the truth in the formal resemblance. But because of the qi-yung expression, it can instead reach the deeper truth. For this reason, the Oriental painting takes a particular position in (World) art.44

As Nishimaki Isamu has already demonstrated in his pioneering study on the subject, this is a literal translation of the passage by Hashimoto Kansetsu cited above.45 The fact that it is included here reveals philologically how Kansetsu’s “nationalistic” idea of the spiritual superiority of Oriental Art provided an appropriate formula for someone like Feng Zikai to develop his own dogmatic treaties. Here we find a concrete example of “questioning narratives and negotiating frameworks” as it was practiced by East-Asian artists in the first half of the twentieth century in their confrontation with Western modernity. The fact also eloquently demonstrates that Western post-impressionism and expressionism were analysed and interpreted in East Asia, during the course of the 1920s, in combination with the revival of the late-Ming/early-Qing literati painting tradition. The “transcultural dynamics” must be understood in this cross-cultural exchange. Although it may be easy to celebrate the East-West dialogue in art; the historical reality reveals that the dialogue in question was actually a kind of uroboros composed of two serpents, the head of each ready to devour the tail of the other in an act of mutual consumption. So-called global art history should be conceived as the outcome of this mutual transaction in which Hashimoto Kansetsu served as a mediator. In conclusion, we must rehabilitate this painter as a key person in the transcultural dynamics of modernity that was experienced by world art history in the first half of the twentieth century during conflicting processes of mutual recognitions between the East and the West. However, there is one question that remains: To what degree can a transnational postcolonial perspective afford a new vista beyond this East-West dichotomy?

Notes 1 Questioning Narratives, Negotiating Frameworks, Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics, Late 19th to Early 21st Centuries, Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut and Museum of Ethnology and Asian Art in Berlin, 5–7 December 2013. 2 “Oriental painting” here refers to tōyō kaiga, as coined by Kansetsu and his contemporary painters in contrast to the Western genre of “Orientalist painting.” The geo-political definition of “EastAsia” in English has its own socio-historical and political context, which does not exactly overlap

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10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17

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with the historical connotation of the former. A critical biography is Nishihara Daisuke 西原大 輔, Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪 (Kyoto: Minerva shobō, 2007). Cf. Shigemi Inaga, “Between Revolutionary and Oriental Sage: Paul Cézanne in Japan,” Japan Review 28 (2015), 133–172. Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2012). Cf. my lecture “Hashimoto Kansetsu between the East and the West” (22 September 2013) at the retrospective exhibition Hashimoto Kansetsu, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, 2013. Main works discussed hereafter were exhibited on this occasion. Shigemi Inaga, “Is Art History Globalizable?” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 249–279. The work is studied in terms of Western impact, but from a different angle by Nishihara, Kansetsu (cf. note 2), 86–87. In his interview “Before the execution 制作を前に,” Kansetsu does not hint at a Persian source although he is talking of the Fairy Woman in question. See Essays by Kansetsu 関雪随筆 (Tokyo: Chūō-bijutsu-sha, 1925), 244–245. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Empreinte (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997); the main body of the text is republished as La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008); L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002). Kansetsu, “Chats in Front of a Lamp 燈前雑話” (written in 1924) in Essays by Kansetsu 関雪随筆 (Tokyo: Chūō-bijutsu-sha, 1925), 248. See also Muramatsu Shigeki 村松茂樹, Studies on Wu Chenshu 呉昌碩研究 (Tokyo: Kenbun-shuppan, 2006). Kakinokihara Kumi 柿木原くみ, “Contacts between Qian Shoutie and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro 銭痩鉄と谷崎潤一郎の周辺,” Calligraphic Studies 19 (2009), 9–22; “Sen Sōtetsu, Arishima Ikuma and their surroundings (supplement), 銭痩鉄と有島生馬の周辺   補訂: 住友寛一と 石井林響と,” Sagami kokubun 相模国文 (Sagami Women’s Univ.) 39 (2012), 42–55. Shana B. Davis, “Welcoming the Japanese Art World: Wang Yiting’s Social and Artistic Exchange with Japanese Sinophiles and Artists” in The Role of Japan, ed. Fogel (cf. note 4), 69–83. For a highly informative general outline, see Maeda Tamaki 前田環, “Fu Baoshi and Japan 傅抱石と日本” in The Coming of New Age in Modern Chinese Art 近代中国美術の胎動, ed. Takimoto Hiroyuki 滝本弘之, Zhan Xiaomei 戦暁梅 (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2011), 219– 236. Hashimoto Kansetsu, “Chats in Front of a Lamp” in Essays by Kansetsu (cf. note 10), 245. In 1934 Kansetsu relates an anecdote that his residence was included among potential candidates for Puyi 溥儀’s possible residence in Japan, when the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty was in custody in Tienjin 天津 after the Beijing coup d’état by Feng Yuxiang 馮玉祥 in 1924. See Tōei 塔影 (April 1934), 2.3; Nishihara, Kansetsu (cf. note 2), 136. For his relationship with contemporary Chinese artists, see, among others, “Chats in Front of the Lamp” in Essays by Kansetsu (cf. note 10), 246–248. A comprehensive overview of this collecting is given in Sofukawa Hiroshi曾布川寛, “The formation of Chinese Painting Collection in Modern Kansai「近代」における関西中国書画コレ クションの形成,” proceedings of an international symposium, Past and Future of the Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Collection in the Kansai Area 関西中国書画コレクションの過去と 未来 (private edition, 2011), 7–18. Nishihara Daisuke 西原大輔, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and the Orientalism 谷崎潤一郎とオリエン タリズム (Tokyo: Chūō-kōron shinsha, 2002). A series of meticulous documentary surveys of the availability of Chinese artworks in Japan is documented in the modern periodical, Kokka, see Kuze Nanako 久世夏奈子, “Newly Imported Chinese Painting through the Expertise of the Journal Kokka — A Case Study of the Modern Japanese View of the Chinese Art 『国華』にみる新来の中国絵画 — 近代日本における中 国美術観の一事例として,” Kokka 国華 1395 (2012), 5–17; “Old Chinese Painting Listed in the Journal Kokka: The Sun-Yuan Painting in Modern Japan and The Establishment of the Appreciation of Literati Painting 『国華』にみる古渡の中国絵画―近代日本における「宋元 画」と文人画評価の成立,” Nihon kenkyū 日本研究 47 (2014), 53–108.

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20 As a contemporary eyewitness, Umezawa Waken declares: “In the West we saw the [e]ruption of the Expressionism, in the East rehabilitation of the literati painting. Both are typical artistic movement[s] after the (First) World War. … And yet I stress that the painters in Japan should incorporate the spirit of Oriental literati painting rather than the German Expressionism, which, by the way, is nothing but the follower of what we used to call Post-Impressionism in France, the German School being the syncretism of the Post-Impressionism, the Futurism, and the Cubism.” Umezawa Waken 梅沢和軒, “The Vogue of the Expressionism and the Rehabilitation of the Literati Painting 表現主義の流行と文人画の復興,” Waseda bungaku 早稲田文学 186 (May 1921), 233. 21 Kansetsu, “Qiyun-Kiin and Life 気韻と生命,” Passage to the Southern School Painting 南画への 道程 (Tokyo: Chūō-bijutsu-sha, 1924), 42–43. For this idiosyncratic remark by Kansetsu and his Chinese source, see Shigemi Inaga, “On Translation of Culture 文化の翻訳性” in Reconstructing the Notion of “Fine Art” in Japan 日本における「美術」概念の再構築, ed. Yamazaki Tsuyoshi 山崎剛, Mori Hitoshi 森仁史 (forthcoming). 22 Kansetsu, “Chats in Front of a Lamp” (cf. note 10), 217. 23 Aoki Masaru 青木正児, “Painting and Treaties by Shitao 石濤の画と画論と,” Sinology 支那学 1/8 (1921), 575–592. 24 For the development of contemporary scholarship, see, Tamaki Maeda, “(Re-)Canonizing Literati Painting in the Early Twentieth Century: The Kyoto Circle” in The Role of Japan, ed. Fogel (cf. note 4), 215–227. 25 Hashimoto Kansetsu, “Brush, Ink and Other Utensils 用筆と墨その他” in Passage (cf. note 21), 97–98. 26 Aida Yuen Wong, “A New Life for Literati Painting in the Early Twentieth Century: Eastern Art and Modernity, a Transcultural Narratives?,” Artibus Asiae 60 (2000), 297–326. 27 Kansetsu, Passage (cf. note 21), 57; Essays by Kansetsu (cf. note 10), 271. 28 Due to lack of space the present paper cannot demonstrate the extent to which Kansetsu was conscious of the practice of Murakami Kagaku. See my Japanese paper on the topic, “Expressionismus and Qiyun Shengdong: Hashimoto Kansetsu and China Studies in Kyoto in the Early Twentieth Century 表現主義と気韻生動: 北清事変から大正末年に至る橋本関雪の軌跡 と京都支那学の周辺,” Nihon kenkyū 日本研究 51 (15 March 2015), 97–125. For a highly inventive reading of Kagaku’s work and the question of global modern art history encompassing the East and West, see Mochida Kimiko 持田季未子, Pictorial Thinking or Paintings that Think 絵画の思考 (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1992). In this book, however, Mochida does not take Shitao into account. 29 Kansetsu, “Chats in Front of a Lamp” (cf. note 10), 271. 30 Cf. Kansetsu, “A Reflection on Southern School 南画への一考察,” (written 1924) in Essays by Kansetsu (cf. note 10), 127. Elsewhere in the same book (pp. 236–237) Kansetsu insists upon Wang’s modesty and respectfulness of nature and art. 31 Kansetsu, “A Reflection” (cf. note 30), 125–126. In another chapter of the same book (p. 265), Kansetsu even pretends that Cézanne is inferior to Yosa Buson 与謝蕪村 (1716–1784, though 蕪村 is printed as 蹟村 because of the error in typography). 32 Ibid., 126. 33 Ibid., 126. On Chen Laolian, Kansetsu once made the following remark to a Chinese friend in writing: “Jin is at the same time pure and monstrous, his painting is eccentric and ugly, but not vulgar despite its vulgar outlook. While lofty and old it is also full of new inventiveness, his talent is almost impossible to grasp.” To which “the interlocutor agreed with amazement” (“Chats in Front of a Lamp,” part I, written on 24 November (presumably of the previous year of the publication, though the year is not explicitly given at the end of the text) (cf. note 10), 239). 34 Kansetsu, “A Reflection” (cf. note 30), 126. 35 Ibid., 127. On the importance of the notion of “Life” in the Taishō Era, see Suzuki Sadami 鈴木 貞美, In Search of the Views on Life, in the Overlapping Crisis 生命観の探究: 重層する危機の なかで (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2007). See also the exhibition catalogue Expressionist Movements in Japan 躍動する魂のきらめき：日本の表現主義, supervised by Mori Hitoshi 森仁史 (The Japan Association of Art Museums 美術館連絡協議会, 2009). 36 Hashimoto Kansetsu, Passage (cf. note 21), 4.

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37 For the general overview of the formation of Japanese and Oriental aesthetics as an ideology in the modern era, see Shigemi Inaga, “Images changeantes de l’art japonais: Depuis la vue impressioniste du Japon à la redécouverte de l’esthétique orientale (1860–1940),” JTLA, Journal of the Faculty of Lettres, Aesthetics (Univ. of Tokyo) 29–30 (2004/2005), 73–93. 38 Kansetsu, Passage (cf. note 21), 14. 39 Ibid., 23. 40 Ibid., 12. 41 Geremie R. Barmé, An Artistic Exile, A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2002). 42 Shigemi Inaga, “Feng Zikai’s Treaties on ‘The Triumph of Chinese Fine Arts in the World Art’ (1930) and the Reception of Western Ideas through Japanese Translation,” Modernism and Translation, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (2006), 12–35. The paper also provides detailed bibliographical references of the source materials Feng made use of for the compilation of his paper. 43 This Japanese book is known to have been highly appreciated in China during the Republican period, where it was used as a primary reference and translated into Chinese. 44 Feng Zikai, “The Triumph of the Chinese Fine Art in the Contemporary World of Art 中国美術 在現代藝術上的勝利,” Oriental Review 東方雑誌 (January 1930), 16–17. 45 Nishimaki Isamu 西槇偉, The Modernity of Chinese Literati Painters 中国文人画家の近代 (Kyoto: Shibunkaku-shuppan, 2005), 259–260.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪 in front of Mokuran/Mulan 木蘭 (1918), c. 1918 (photo courtesy: Hashimoto Shinji, Hakusasonsō Hashimoto Kansetsu Garden & Museum, Kyoto). Fig. 2: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Story of Guo Ju 郭巨, from Twenty Four Paragons of Filial Piety 二四孝, 1919, colour on silk, 188.5 × 66.8-44.5 cm, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (reproduced from: Hashimoto Kansetsu Retrospective 生誕130年橋本関雪展, exhibition catalogue Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (n.p.: 生誕130年橋本関雪展 実行委員会 Hashimoto Kansetsu Retrospective executive committee, 2013), p. 106, fig. 52). Fig. 3: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Fairy Woman 僊女, 1926, colour on silk, framed panel, 280 × 171 cm, Ōtani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City (photo courtesy: Ōtani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City). Fig. 4: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Visiting the Hermit 訪隠, 1930, colour on silk, 221 × 176 cm, Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi City (photo courtesy: Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Shimane). Fig. 5: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Examining the Bull 相牛, 1925, pair of screens, colour on silk, 167.8 × 270 cm each, private collection (reproduced from: Hashimoto Kansetsu Retrospective 生誕130年橋本関雪展, exhibition catalogue Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, n.p.: 生誕130年橋本関雪展実行委員会 Hashimoto Kansetsu Retrospective executive committee, 2013, fig. 18). Fig. 6: Luo Zhenyu-Ra Shingyoku 羅振玉 with his friends in Kyoto at his farewell party, 1919. (From left to right: Nagao Uzan 長尾雨山, Inukai Tsuyoshi 犬養毅, Luo, Tomioka Tessai 富岡鉄斎, Naitō Konan 内藤湖南) (photo courtesy: Kiyoshikōjin Seichō-ji Tessai Museum, Takarazuka City). Fig. 7: Shitao 石濤, Scroll of the Yellow Mountain 黄山図巻, 1699, ink and colour on paper, 28.7 × 182.1 cm, Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Kyoto, © Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum (photo courtesy: Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Kyoto). Fig. 8: Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, cover and title page of Shitao/Sekitō 石濤, 1925. Fig. 9: Shitao 石濤, Album of the Mountains and Water 山水画冊, ink on paper, former Hashimoto Kansetsu collection, frontispiece of Passage to the Southern School of Painting 南画への道程, 1924.

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Rethinking Coevalness Entangled History and the Objects of Ethnological Museums In this paper, I will tell several stories––some might say histories––from Africa and other parts of an interconnected world. These stories focus not only on artistic practices, but also on the historical contexts in which these practices were and are embedded. As always, however, it is necessary to begin, in a self-reflexive way, with “our” history, in this case with a story from Western (or Northern) academia. As early as 1983, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian published his seminal book Time and the Other, in which he focused on the “denial of coevalness” as a formative element of the Western colonial construction of the “other.”1 Although the study centres mainly on the role of anthropology in the development of this fatal discursive construction, the concept of denial of coevalness is indicative of a broader phenomenon that shaped an entire way of conceptualizing non-Western peoples during the age of imperialism and colonialism. Constructed as isolated in time and space prior to colonialization, and thus as not having been participants in (“Western”) historical development, the non-Euro-American peoples that were studied by the new discipline of anthropology could be conceptualized in an evolutionary sense as the “survivals” of an unilineal past — that is, of “prehistoric stages” in the evolution of humankind. They were therefore deemed to be in need of European intervention for inclusion in history and, by extension, in (“Western”) “civilization”: a self-appointed mission that colonial ideology revealingly implemented through the three big Cs––“Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization”––and which in Africa, among other places, eventually resulted in colonial conquest and exploitation. After more than three decades, harsh criticism of the ideological construction of non-coevalness has become a commonplace in academia. But the questions about how coevalness can really be re-established have not yet been answered in a convincing way, especially within the art historical narrative. How exactly can a shared, relational history of an entangled world be conceptualized? How can we develop a truly de-centred view of (art) history? Under the current conditions of globalization––a period of increasing interconnectedness in art as well as in all other spheres of economic, political, cultural, and social activity––it seems an easy task to take multiplicities into account as the coeval, synchronous developments of a decentralized modernity.2 It is no accident, therefore, that the latest globalization thrust since the 1980s and the study of spatially “unbounded” (translocal, transnational, global etc.) cultural and artistic practices coincide in time.

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But what about earlier periods? In this discussion I will focus on one kind of material and artistic expression that lay at the very core of the construction of non-coeval peoples, namely on African artefacts from ethnological museums, whose collections very concretely objectify the denial of coevalness. With regard to Africa, the fact that the collecting and research interests of early museum ethnology did not relate to coeval societies, affected first by the expansion of the world market and then by colonization, but exclusively to those artefacts that were seen as “traditional” and were collected in order to provide the supposed key to early stages in the development of humankind, is a subject that has been thoroughly analysed. The actual temporal contexts of the objects were considered irrelevant, and the products and their producers were projected de facto into a timeless “ethnographic present.” Collecting practice screened out the entire history of the African continent, including its century-long interconnectedness not only with Europe but also with Asia and the Americas, and in its place created the fiction of unchanging, “traditional,” and homogeneous “tribal” (or “ethnic”) cultures whose objects were to be “rescued.” This means that, on one hand, all collected artefacts were conceptually taken out of their African context of spatial, social, political, and ethnic mobility, and on the other, that everything that had reached Africa from “outside” during centuries of interconnection, as well as all kinds of “hybrid” objects produced as a consequence of this long cultural exchange, were deemed unworthy of documentation. The result is that museum collections from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries do not reflect contemporaneous African culture; instead they materialize the colonial appropriation, redefinition, and, in final analyses, construction of Africa. Meanwhile, more than one century later, African history has become a welldeveloped discipline that can trace historical developments in the continent back to periods that were coeval with those of European or Asian “prehistory.”3 But what about African art history? John Peffer’s statement in an article from 2005 still applies today: “Where most other fields of art historical inquiry are arranged around discrete periods, for instance pre-Columbian, Roman, nineteenth century French of Post ‘45 art, African art history has tended to be associated more with a dual sense of place: peripheral in the academy and continental in the map.”4 Although a historical reconstruction of past artistic developments is partly possible–– especially for regions like North Africa and the Nile valley, Nigeria, the Congo area, the Horn of Africa or the East African Coast––it is hindered not only by scarce archaeological or other material evidence, but also by the fact that the very objects that were taken out of their temporal context of immediately precolonial and colonial times are still considered to be in some way representative of “authentic,” ultimately timeless, precolonial African cultures. Even if the terms “traditional” or “tribal” African art have largely fallen out of use, the same idea is expressed by the terms “canonical” or “classical” African art, which are used today and still imply some kind of atemporality and non-coevalness,5 whereas decidedly “historical” regions such as North Africa, Ethiopia, or the Nile Valley are still (tacitly) understood as “not-so-African.”

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Are artefacts from Africa still in some way conceived as belonging to another time and another place then? In fact, in an article in a recent Texte zur Kunst issue dedicated to “globalism,” the art historian Susanne Leeb refers to the objects of ethnological museums in a somewhat ambiguous way under the heading “asynchronous objects.”6 What are the implications of this designation? Truly, the objects collected in late precolonial and colonial times are asynchronous in relation both to the present and to their newest re-appropriation, namely the one put into effect by contemporary art and in particular in newly-conceptualized “post-ethnographic” museums such as the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt.7 This is a re-appropriation that Leeb is primarily––and absolutely rightly––calling into question, since contemporary art can easily be used as a means to disguise the real contexts in which ethnographic objects came to Europe. But Leeb’s argument goes one step further. Following the aesthetic theorist Peter Osborne, she rejects the idea of contemporaneity altogether as “projecting a non-existing unit on the fragmenting and mutually exclusive relations between contemporaneities.”8 She summarizes Osborne’s argument thusly: “Contemporariness is not a matter of temporal uniformity but a form of subjectivity,” one which has to take heterochronies and heterotopies into account.9 As she correctly states, the restitution of contemporariness would imply first and foremost a revision of the epistemological categories on which the distinction between (historical) art or archaeological museums10 and (ahistorical) ethnological museums was based in the nineteenth century, that is, a revision of the categories of the “modern” and “traditional” which are perpetuated to this day through the institutional order of collections.11 At this point, however, her critique becomes equivocal, since she suggests, with regard to ethnographic objects, that one must “understand working through a past that is not sharable, or sharable only under the condition of radical disparities, to be part of what constitutes contemporariness.”12 Why shouldn’t the past be sharable once we have revised the epistemology that led to the separation of the “West and the Rest”? This problematic assertion is derived from the philosophical argumentation of the aesthetic theorist Peter Osborne, on which, as previously mentioned, Leeb bases her discussion. In his criticism of the current idea of global contemporariness, Osborne speaks of inherently disjunctive times and spaces, that is, of heterochronies and heterotopies which are brought together in a “non-existing unity” by the “fiction” of the contemporary, thus disavowing the asymmetrical geopolitical and economic conditions under which today’s globality is created.13 Again, it should be a matter of course to take geopolitical contexts into account, particularly, but not exclusively, as regards the present global artistic contemporaneity euphoria that is Osborne’s main target of criticism. And surely, from a phenomenological point of view, there is no subject position from which “the relational totality of the currently coeval times of human existence” can be experienced.14 But which conclusions should we draw from this? Osborne extends the philosophical proposition of the theoretical impossibility of a lived unity of space and time onto the past and its historical reconstruction, thus rejecting recent global history writing as “fictional” as well.15 However, this begs the question: from which subject position are “other” times and “other” places in

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world history defined if not, once again, from the hegemonic point of view held by Western historiography? If we speak, even from a postcolonially informed vantage point, of heterochronies and heterotopies or of a past that is not shareable, do we not risk continuing to take the unilineal narrative of Western modernity as a benchmark? In the last analyses this would confirm, once again, the narrative that, since colonial times, has been unable to abdicate from constructing asynchronies. In the context of these attitudes to the past, one should note that it is precisely relational global history writing that has demonstrated, in the last decade, that the “modern world” (however we want to conceive it and with all asymmetries and exclusions that it implies) was not created by an Euro-American “centre,” but has resulted from complex entanglements encompassing all continents: a reading of the past has been established, which highlights coevalness and interconnections in a multi-centred world.16 Moreover, with reference to Africa, historians have long since rejected the idea of the peoples of the continent as passive victims of (again “Western”-made) history and have turned their attention to the agency of African actors in coping, even in conditions of insecurity and violence, with foreign-imposed regimes such as colonialism. Thus, I propose leaving aside the concept of “contemporaneity,” which, despite being privileged in art analysis, not only marks a condition that is nearly unattainable from a philosophical point of view, but also inevitably seems to conjure up the problem-fraught idea of the temporally and spatially “other.” Instead, we should turn back to coevalness and reflect on the position, in a coeval and decentred art history, of that aesthetic production from Africa now in ethnological museums, thus also fulfilling Dipesh Chakrabarty’s more than ten-year-old summons to “provincialize” Europe.17 The stories that I am going to tell here constitute impulses in this direction; they have also formed the basis of several interventions in the current permanent Africa exhibition in the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,18 which I realized in 2014. These experimental interventions were subsumed under the title “Provincializing Europe–– the Afrocentric Gaze,” and they will be drawn upon here in order to develop my argument.19 My first story begins in the West Central African Kingdom of Kongo at the end of the fifteenth century, when Portuguese ships first arrived on the coasts of Africa.20 Seeking not only to establish trade––including slave trade––but also to spread Christianity and build alliances with Christian or Christianized peoples on their way to India, the Portuguese established economic and military relationships with several African rulers, and the rulers of the Kongo became their closest allies. Within a few decades after the first contact in 1483, the Kongolese kings Nzinga a Nkuvu (baptized as João I of Kongo) and his son and successor Afonso I Nvemba a Nzinga adopted Christianity together with the majority of the political elite and promoted the new faith as the official religion of the kingdom. This was the birth of what Linda Heywood and John Thornton, two major historians of West Central African and Atlantic societies, call “the Kongolese version of Atlantic creole culture.”21 Up to the nineteenth century, the relationship between Portugal and the Kongo kingdom involved the exchange of gifts and regalia, the education of Kon-

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Fig. 1: Jaspar Beckx, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Congo, c. 1643–50, 75 × 62 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

golese princes and nobles in Portugal, as well as the supply not only of priests, but also of Christian sacred objects and paraphernalia. A local missionary school system was established together with a number of parishes, and in 1595 the Kongo kingdom became an Episcopal see, with the church of São Salvador in the capital as cathedral. The new Kongolese creole culture was not only characterized by the profession of Christianity, but also by knowledge of European languages (including Latin), literacy, and an acquaintance with European political and legal ideas. The Kongolese elite had close contacts to Europe and South America, and emissaries from the kingdom “could move,” as Heywood and Thornton remark, “comfortably in the world of European nobles.”22 This entanglement between the “North” and the “Southern” (or “Black”) Atlantic––and, indeed, contemporariness in Osborne’s terms––becomes evident in European portraits of that time, for instance in Don Miguel de Castro, Kongo’s ambassador to the Netherlands, executed in the middle of the seventeenth century in Brazil by the Dutch painter Jaspar Beckx. In the painting, the emissary of Kongo’s province of Soyo to Brazil and the Netherlands is depicted in clothing worn by Portuguese nobles of the time (fig. 1).23 Moreover, it was not just in the political realm, but also in religious matters that the transcultural exchange and cooperation––in the case of religion between Capuchin and Jesuit missionaries on the one side and Kongolese Christians on the other––strictly remained, as Heywood and Thornton put it, under Kongolese control. It was not the few ordained priests but rather a Christian-educated Kongolese secular clergy that “carried the faith to every corner of the kingdom.”24 These lay ministers per-

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Fig. 2: Anonymous (Loango coast) nkisi lumweno (power figure), 19th century, 36 × 33 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

formed even the main sacrament of baptism. In the course of the translation process carried out by both Kongolese and Portuguese missionaries, the Christian concept of holiness came to be expressed by the local term ukisi, which generally referred to other-worldly forces that could enter objects and transform them into “power objects.” At the same time, non-Christian religious practices and beliefs continued in tandem with terms connected to the concept of “ukisi,” which had itself become a part of Christian practice.25 One major expression of the coexistence and merging of Christian and nonChristian Kongolese religious culture are the so-called minkisi (sing. nkisi; fig. 2). These are power objects that, through the addition of efficacious substances (“medicines”), have become loaded with non-human forces that enable them to persecute evil and to mediate between the worlds of the living and the dead. European explorers began to collect minkisi in the nineteenth century, which, especially in their figurative composition,26 are hybrid objects that incorporate not only European goods––such as valuable imported cloth, mirrors, and nails––as ingredients of their power, but probably also elements of Christian images. The shape and pronounced realism of reliquary busts containing glass monstrances in their bellies, which had been widespread in European Catholicism since the Middle Ages, seem to have been one source of inspiration for the form of figurative minkisi (fig. 3, pl. IVa). Even the practice of hitting nails into a type of power figures called zinkondi (sing. nkondi)––one example can be seen in the background of fig. 3––is possibly derived

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Fig. 3: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Reflections: Art in the Contact Zone” and “Philosophy in the Contact Zone: Europe under the Spell of Fetishism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

from the crucifixes that the missionaries introduced in the Kongo region, and which were soon produced by Kongolese artists as well.27 To prevent any Eurocentric misconceptions, let me be clear that this latter practice does not have to be interpreted according to the prejudice as some sort of maleficent magic, rather, zinkondi had retributive and protective functions. And driving a nail into the body of the figure served to “activate” their power and to induce them to persecute wrongdoers responsible for private or public misfortune. The intricacies of both the denial and the restoration of coevalness become evident when we re-enter the perspective of Euro-American art history during the period in which modernist artists in Europe were strongly influenced by the encounter with African and other non-Western art forms both in their artistic expressions and in their idea of modernity. Despite the centuries of exchange with Europe and the Americas, as well as the earlier Christian value given to the

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ukisi concept (originally shared by European missionaries), in the nineteenth century minkisi were subsumed under the category of “fetish” and were even deemed to be a paradigmatic example of “fetishism”––this latter being classified by evolutionary thought as a “primitive” or “barbaric” stadium of religious development. The Euro-American side of the story is well known: the concept of the fetish, of a “self-made” god, is the most prominent European discursive product of the early contact zone between Europe and the Western African coasts, that is––as William Pietz has put it––of a “potential space of cultural revolution” characterized by the instability of values and meanings.28 Fetishism, the alleged worship of objects and idols in Africa, was in truth a discursive figure of European thought, which projected its own concerns onto the “other.” The concept encapsulated the problematic relationship between humans and things (i.e. immateriality and materiality, subject and object, etc.) that have been strictly separated in Europe, as opposed to most other world cultures, since the modern age. Since the beginnings of contact with Africa, in European discourse fetishism marked a “corrupt object relation”29 or an “abnormal traffic”30 that stood in sharp contrast to modern (also economic) rationality; during the course of the following centuries it developed into a classical concept in which the changing self-positionings of Europe in relation to the constructed “other” were concretized: a process in which not only power relations were at stake, but also––and most fundamentally––the “self ” was negotiated in the “other.” Through the projection to the outside, that which, from the European point of view, was at once repressed and dangerously fascinating could be exorcised. Thus, the term “fetish” was first used by the Portuguese since the beginnings of encounter to damn supposed practices of African idolatry, devil worship, and witchcraft––practices that were feared and persecuted in Europe at the time. After the Reformation, fetishism served as a means for Protestant authors to polemicize against the worship of saints and relics in Catholicism, which was deemed almost fetishist, whilst later on, in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, it was used as an argument proving the irrationality of any form of religion. The career of the fetish reached its apex in the nineteenth century––that is, in “the century of things” or of objectification, as Hartmut Böhme rightly points out.31 On one hand, the devaluation of fetishism as a low or even the lowest level in the development of religion gained strength at that time, leading to the call for “civilization” to be imposed on Africans. On the other hand, with Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism followed by that of sexual fetishism propagated by Freud and other founding fathers of the analyses of the psyche and of sexuality, the concept definitely established itself as a means of introspection into the “own” culture and as a term that was, in Böhme’s words, “intended … to shed light on … and, above all: to get rid of, the frightening other of the own.”32 Intriguingly, in this context it was thought that the process of “civilization” directed against African “fetishism” could be achieved through the introduction of capitalistic market exchange, that is––of “commodity fetishism.” This concern with the self is also apparent in the ultimate “discovery” of the fetish (including the minkisi, in addition to other objects defined as fetishes) by modernist art and particularly by the surrealists, this time as a

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means to recover––in a positive sense––“originary,” non-rational ways to connect to the material and immaterial world that had not yet been tamed by “civilization.”33 But what about coevalness during the period of the modernist (re)discovery of the fetish? In one way it can be easily restored: the Euro-American eagerness to collect “authentic” and “original” African “fetishes” stimulated Kongolese artists to produce for the new market. In the article quoted above, John Peffer points out that several unfinished or “undoctored” minkisi can be identified in Euro-American collections as specimens of this export art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.34 Forming one salient example, he cites two minkisi that were probably bought by Paul Gauguin at the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris. Gauguin cleaned the pieces up, added paint and other materials, and signed them with his own initials.35 This type of export sculpture from the Kongo and the neighbouring Loango coast is in fact coeval with modernist art. To quote Peffer: “Loango sculpture for export and modernist primitivism are contemporaneous examples of cross-cultural translation. They are poignant examples of how art can be a site for historical processes of identification (or misidentification), exchange, diffusion, and alterity.”36 As an aside––and to counter a further stereotype of “authenticity” to which even Peffer seems to subscribe when he defines pieces of such export art as “second rate”––a look to museum collections reveals that African sculptors also produced first-rate art pieces for the market. It should be never forgotten that agency, including artistic agency, also exists under conditions of oppression. Peffer’s focus on export art, however, excludes from coevalness all the minkisi definitely produced for local use (including the ones depicted here) that reached Europe and North America at the same time. A number of these pieces were relinquished as a result of missionary and colonial government endeavours to repress minkisi practices, since they constituted an alternative form of religious and political power. Others were sold after they lost their efficacy, becoming, so to speak, exhausted by frequent use. The question, then, is how coevalness should be conceptualized in those cases where the interconnections between Africa and Europe did not result in cultural and artistic forms that are in some way assimilable to contemporaneous Euro-American art production. Actually, if we focus only on this latter type of artistic form we are in danger of continuing to construct the Euro-American branch as the “principal branch” of (art) history to which all multiplicities should relate. But isn’t our aim the provincialization of Europe? Weren’t the pieces produced for local use––that is, the outcome of four centuries of contact between Europe and Kongolese religious practices dealing with different versions of Christianity––coeval with, for example, European sacral art which, especially in Southern Europe, was producing reliquary busts well into the nineteenth century? Why should we exclude these very specific Atlantic creole translations of entanglement from world history or art history? I am now speaking of the whole Creole or “Black Atlantic,” since minkisi reached the Americas in various forms and were once more reinterpreted in their new contexts, as we shall see below. In the “Provincializing Europe” exhibition interventions, these multiple strands of entanglement were concretized in two episodes following the structure of the Art

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Fig. 4: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Appropriations: Europeanism and Primitivism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

from Africa permanent exhibition.37 The first episode, titled “Appropriations: Europeanism and Primitivism” (fig. 4, pl. IVb), was situated in one of the introductory rooms of the permanent exhibition, which is dedicated in its whole to the reciprocal appropriations of artistic ideas and forms resulting from the historical interconnections between Europe, Africa, and Asia. The room includes other early artistic expressions of the European-African contact zone, such as the ivory salt cellars seen in the background of fig. 4, which were produced in the fifteenth/sixteenth century on the West African coast following European models. In this exhibition context, one major Christian art piece from the Kongo kingdom, a sculpture representing Saint Anthony of Padua, which probably dates from the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, was contrasted with an European primitivist art piece from the 1920s, namely the sculpture Lying Flora by the German artist Gustav Heinrich Wolff (1886–1934). The anonymous figure of Saint Anthony shows how in the historical Kingdom of Kongo it was not only artistic forms from Europe, but also Christian ideas that were reworked and merged with local religious and political concepts. The formal rendering of the saint as a young clergyman with a monk’s cowl and book, consistent with the canon of European sacral art, is combined with the depiction of the Christ child as a Kongolese ruler holding a fly-whisk, the local emblem of power, in his hand (fig. 5). This last detail is evocative of ideas that originated within the so-called Antonian movement, a religious and political re-

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Fig. 5: Anonymous (Kongo kingdom), Saint Anthony, 18th/19th century, h 51 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

newal movement in the Kongo kingdom that centred on the figure of the Saint Anthony and was created in the early eighteenth century by the Kongolese noblewoman Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (c. 1684–1706).38 Following turmoil and civil wars that, due to external (mainly European) pressures as well as internal dynastic problems lasted since the middle of the seventeenth century, Dona Beatriz propagated from 1704 to her death in 1706 the credo that the key to peace was to be found in a specific Kongolese renewal of Catholicism. Through direct contact to God in heaven and possession by Saint Anthony, she had the revelation that Christ and the Holy Family were Kongolese (which Europeans missionaries were hiding from local people) and that God required Kongo to be reunited under a new king. Salvation, she declared, would come through prayer and the abandonment of selfishness and factionalism. Whereas most Kongolese nobles as well as the European Capuchin friars condemned the movement as heretical––which eventually led to Dona Beatriz’s execution by burning in 1706––the movement gained large popular support, especially among villagers, and can be seen as a further development of specific Kongolese Christianity. This line of thought, which is expressed in Saint Anthony’s statues (later also used as powerful minkisi), outlived Dona Beatriz’s death and was even carried to the Americas––a fact to which we shall return below. The juxtaposition of the multifaceted Kongolese appropriation of European ideas and forms as condensed in the anonymous Saint Anthony and the European modernist fascination with African forms represented by Gustav Heinrich Wolff’s

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Lying Flora, reveals the superficiality of the Western “discovery” of art from Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also––especially––brings the very roots of artistic modernity to the fore. On the one hand, Wolff’s sculpture demonstrates how the artists of classical modernism, who appropriated formal elements employed by African or other “exotic” artists, were projecting colonial ideas of primitiveness, unspoiltness, and feminine disposability on the “other” whose so-defined artistic production was to serve as a source of inspiration for a formal renewal of the European art tradition. Here, the classical motif of the Roman goddess Flora is invigorated by the reduction of the facial features, the emphasis on the volume of the singular body parts, and the animation of the surface through the still visible traces of the tools. On the other hand, through a confrontation between the primitivist misapprehension of the exotic “other” and the centuries of interconnection between Africa and Europe represented by the Kongolese Saint Anthony, it becomes evident that it is precisely this oblivion of a shared history which created the very foundation of the “modern,” since this can only be defined through the construction of its antithesis: an unchanging “traditional”––ahistorical or primitive––“non-modern.” By way of further contrast, the real interconnections between Africa and Europe that were in actual fact instrumental in shaping historical modernity were shown in the second exhibition intervention episode (already partly rendered in fig. 4). This was centred on European-Kongolese relations and was situated in the room of the permanent exhibition in which the minkisi, that is, the specifically local aspect of Kongolese religious culture, are displayed. Under the headings “Reflections: Art in the Contact Zone” and “Philosophy in the Contact Zone: Europe under the Spell of Fetishism,” the intervention addressed multiple correspondences that had their origin in the contact zone. On one side, the minkisi from the Berlin African collection, all from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, were brought together with testimonies of Kongolese as well as European Catholicism. The display of a Flemish reliquary bust from the early sixteenth century depicting an unknown bishop-saint underscored the parallels––despite the temporal gap––between the shape and function of minkisi and that of figurative reliquaries. This included an accentuated realistic rendering, especially of the head and the face, and more notably, the sealed receptacles attached to the chest or the abdomen in both types of sculptures. In the case of the reliquaries, these receptacles were intended to preserve––efficacious––relics and, in the case of the minkisi, to preserve “medicine,” in other words, the efficacious substances that empower the sculptures.39 As Hartmut Böhme reminds us, in the belief of medieval Catholicism the saints were de facto present––they truly lived–– not only in the body parts that were worshipped as relics, but also in the images that served as receptacles: through their efficacy they mediated between men and God, but above all they helped with worldly problems such as illness and misfortune, or even at war and in performing maleficent magic.40 Thus, reliquaries functioned in a way that is not very dissimilar from that of minkisi, the latter being receptacles of power and mediators between the world of the living and the “other

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Fig. 6: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Reflections: Art in the Contact Zone” and “Philosophy in the Contact Zone: Europe under the Spell of Fetishism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

world” (the world of the dead). The only exception to this was maleficent magic, which is fought against but not performed through minkisi. One further showcase joined together Kongolese and European variations of the cross and nails motif (fig. 6): a Kongolese brass crucifix (presumably dating between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century) was flanked by two zinkondi, showing the possible appropriation and resignification of nailing in the context of minkisi religious practices. Beneath it, an elaborate baroque reliquary retable from late eighteenth-century Upper Bavaria containing an iron nail from Christ’s cross testified to the enduring importance, especially in popular Catholicism, of the nails from the crucifix, and more generally of objects that were assumed to have come into contact with Christ, as potent relics. The Euro-American fascination––or obsession––with fetishism and its strongly sexualized trajectory through the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was evoked non-visually in The Velvet Underground’s hypnotic song “Venus in Furs” (1966), an underground hymn of sexual subversion reinterpreting Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s fetishistic-masochistic novel from 1870. All these aesthetic forms can be seen as vital elements in an entangled art history of modernity, which includes interconnections as well as specifically regional developments — be it in Europe, Africa, or in the rest of the Atlantic world.

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This argument can also be pursued with an example from the realm of politics, which brings us to the Western side of the Atlantic. The slave revolt and concomitant revolution in the colony of Saint Domingue is well known as the most extensive and successful emancipation movement in a slave society. The revolt led in 1804 to the formation of Haiti, which became (after the United States) the second independent state in the Americas, and the first to completely abolish slavery. It is also well known that, especially, free Creole revolutionaries in Haiti were inspired by the ideas of the French revolution and entered into alliances with the most progressive forces among the French revolutionaries. Thus, the revolution has been interpreted as a movement originating in what is commonly seen as the (Western-connected) “modern” diasporic “Black” or Creole Atlantic and its interactions with coeval French political movements. This is surely correct. However, as John Thornton has convincingly demonstrated, the revolutionary endeavours, especially on the part of slaves, were influenced in an equal measure by Kongolese political ideology. Corresponding with European conflicting monarchist and republican ideologies of the time, we find a distinction between two similar ideologies in political concepts from the Kongo kingdom: on one side, an absolutist concept of the monarch as a military leader who acquires his power by force; and on the other, if not a republican idea, then at least an idea that might be termed a constitutional monarchy, according to which the power of the sovereign ought to be amenable to control by his subjects and be used for the well-being of the country. It is this second political idea that was propagated in Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita’s version of Kongolese Catholicism through the Antonian movement and which further developed after her death. In particular, it gained strength during the eighteenth century in the context of new civil wars which, once again, aimed to restore a “just” kingship and led to an increase of slave export in the same century. Thus, we can safely assume that the “modern” Haitian revolution was the result of entanglements between forces and ideas not only of Haitian and European, but also of Kongolese origin. Moreover, the slaves’ revolutionary action was shaped in a decisive way by Kongolese social and military organizational principles.41 Eastern Atlantic Kongolese political culture, as it was locally shaped within early modern historical entanglements as well as in its diasporic reconstitution in the Western Atlantic, is thus just as much a part of a decentred world history as is French political culture, which likewise reached the Caribbean. Again, a number of religious and aesthetic expressions of this Western Atlantic reformulation of Kongolese culture can be found. They have been traced in detail, especially by Robert Farris Thompson, and are most obvious (besides the better known case in music) in Afro-Cuban as well as in Haitian religious practice, among others; the latter, for example, derived from minkisi so-called pakèts congo, which are understood to this day to contain and activate the power of divinities.42 Coming now explicitly to the origins of historical modernity, my next stories and exhibition interventions will demonstrate again the two sides of coevalness: the connection with and the independence from Western (or Northern) developments. The first case is best illustrated by the fact that industrialization and modernization

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Fig. 7: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Sweetness and Power: Entanglements of Exploitation,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

could only take place in Europe based on the exchange with Africa, Asia, and the Americas and on the exploitation of the human and natural resources of these continents. One major example of these entanglements is the history of sugar production and consumption. As Sidney W. Mintz elaborates in his pioneering study Sweetness and Power,43 it was first and foremost the slave labour on the American sugar cane plantations that marked the first (early) industrial mode of production, thus laying the foundations for the further development of this form of labour in European factories. Luxury products, such as sugar, which were produced by slave labour in the colonies, contributed to a “consumer revolution” in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and boosted economic growth. With industrialization in the nineteenth century, as Mintz has shown for the United Kingdom, sugar became a cheap dietary necessity for the poor, allowing the conservation of foods and providing the “irreducible minimum beyond which lay only starvation.”44 Both formed the preconditions for the exploitation of male and female factory labourers, since such work meant that time was now lacking for older, more time-consuming ways of food processing. Inspired by the title of Mintz’s book, these interconnections were hinted at in the intervention titled “Sweetness and Power: Entanglements of Exploitation” (fig. 7, pl. Va). Here, both an ornate silver sugar bowl from the eighteenth century as well as the reproduction of one of Frans Post’s seventeenth-century Brazilian paintings––the depiction of a Brazilian

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Fig. 8: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Art and the Birth of Modernity,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

landscape with a sugar mill––were placed in the section of the permanent exhibition dedicated to the art of the Benin kingdom (modern day Nigeria)––another major visual product of Atlantic entanglements in Africa, since the brass which allowed for an unprecedented artistic florescence in Benin from the fifteenth century onwards, was imported through trade (including slave trade) with the Europeans.45 However, an art history of modernity which provincializes Europe encompasses many more aesthetic forms than the ones discussed thus far and must include which have been long considered epitomes of the “traditional.” This was exemplified in the intervention “Art and the Birth of Modernity” (fig. 8, pl. Vb), which was situated in the permanent exhibition section dedicated to the relation between art and political power in Africa. Throughout the world, the beginnings of modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century were informed by the expansion of the capitalist world market. Global history writing has shown that this led globally to social crises, which in turn culminated in revolutionary movements in the late eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century in the formation of new political entities such as national states in Europe.46 These radical social and political changes

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Fig. 9: Anonymous (Chokwe region, Northeastern Angola), Chibinda Ilunga, 19th century, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

were also expressed through the development of new artistic forms. In European history, the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte is representative of this transformative process, which in art manifested itself through the emergence of French neo-classicism. The famous painting by Jacques-Louis David depicting Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the Saint Bernard Pass (1801) stylizes the then first consul, through the formal recourse to Roman Caesarism, as a hero of modernity, a reading which is reinforced by the reference to the names of Hannibal and Charlemagne that are engraved in the rocks in the foreground. In the “Art and the Birth of Modernity” intervention, the reproduction of David’s painting on an illuminated box was brought into connection with one of the most prominent pieces from the Berlin collections: a statue commonly interpreted as depicting the culture hero Chibinda Ilunga, which was probably created between the 1850s and the 1870s by an artist belonging to Chokwe society in today’s Angola (fig. 9). According to legend, Chibinda Ilunga was the founder of the most powerful kingdom in the region, the Kingdom of Lunda, from whom the Chokwe rulers considered themselves descended. The vigorous portrayal of this mythical ancestor objectifies the political concept of kingship in the region, which was traced back to Chibinda Ilunga and, borrowed from the Lunda, was used to legitimize the rule of kings and chiefs in a number of groups in central and eastern Angola, Zambia, and southern Congo, all of whom claimed him as an ancestor.47 At first sight, Napoleon and Chibinda seem to be situated in mutually exclusive times and places. In reality, they are situated in the context of the same historical

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developments and their places of origin are interconnected. Not only does the Portuguese occupation of the Angolan coast date back to the sixteenth century (which led also to the emergence of a strong creole Luso-African middleman society); it was precisely in the nineteenth century that the close ties between West Central Africa (and Africa generally) and the expanding Western-dominated world market led to an intensification and expansion of trade far into the interior of the continent. As was the case in Europe, the expansion of the market led to an acceleration of social and political transformation, and it is in this very specific historical context that Chokwe art, as exemplified by Chibinda Ilunga, has to be situated. Chokwe society did not exist from time immemorial, as the stereotype might assume. It was formed only in connection with the economic changes of the nineteenth century when, as a result of the transition from slave trade to what was then referred to as “legitimate commerce” (commodity fetishism!) by the Europeans, scattered communities of hunters and refugees from slave raids came to wealth and power as traders in mainly ivory and beeswax and as a consequence developed a distinct common identity as “Chokwe.” The many competing, trading chiefs cemented their claim to power by supporting artistic production, and ancestral royal figures were of special importance for legitimizing these political parvenus. Furthermore, even the idea of a common descendancy from the Lunda kingdom, which was claimed by rulers in the whole region (hence the emphasis upon the mythical founder Chibinda Ilunga), was an innovation of the nineteenth century; it served as a means of establishing trust between different political and social groups within the newly developed long-distance trading system. These facts suggest that the diffusion of Chokwe art was also embedded in commercial relationships. The outstanding Berlin Chibinda Ilunga figure was bought from a Chokwe trader in 1878 by the German traveller Otto H. Schütt in the proximity of a trading outpost: a circumstance which is not exceptional, since Chokwe (and Luso-African) trade covered, alongside the main trading products, not just local artefacts, but also in general all items that were of interest to Europeans such as zoological specimens or even living parrots. In this context, however, it is important to note that the market did not just serve European trade: European crucifixes and religious figures still found their way from the coast into the interior where they gave way, in Chokwe and Lunda territory, to the so-called (in Chokwe language) hamba a santu, the cult of European saints that was integrated into the cult of local supernatural entities (hamba, pl. mahamba). Most importantly, Chokwe traders also exported the highly valued sculptures in the specific Chokwe style to Lunda, among other places, where Kongolese traders in turn brought figures to sell––possibly minkisi. In short, West Central African political formations, which find one expression in the artistic form of Chibinda Ilunga statuary, are a coeval phenomenon with European (proto)national states, as both are situated historically in the context of the rise of capitalism and the expansion of the world market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why then should we not see David’s portrayal of Napoleon (and subsequent artistic production situated in the context of European national

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state building) and the anonymous Chibinda Ilunga depiction (and generally Angolan artistic production of that time) as being part of the same, coeval art history? Chibinda Ilunga’s specific West Central African aesthetic translation of the geopolitical conditions of the nineteenth century, in which the political and economic dynamics as well as the violence of the times are contained and bound in a strong (sociopolitical) body, belongs to a decentred global art history, as does Napoleon’s outward-directed dynamic, which in turn embodies the Western ideology of modernity as permanent motion. In fact, it is nothing if not this constructed modern which makes the invention of an unchanging “non-modern,” encompassing Chibinda Ilunga statuary, indispensable, thus also provoking its exclusion––and that of historical art from Africa in general––from (art) history. And it is nothing if not this constructed modern which the West and Western (including Western-influenced) academia have not yet wholly left behind. To conclude: the stories told in this article can be located in a coeval, entangled global (art) history. The specifically Africa-related exhibition interventions show, I hope, that perspectives using the idiom of multiple or even decentralized “modernities” risk, as long as they relate only to Euro-American modernity, continuing to imply a singular model originating in the “West.” Such perspectives cannot grasp local realities where the processes of world-encompassing connectivity engender the emergence of independent cultural forms that may not correspond to the definition of Western modernity or may constitute alternative models countering it. In the end, relational perspectives that take the Euro-American part of the story as their starting point and either connect non-Western stories to it or exclude them altogether from a shared past do not abandon the unidirectional telos of Eurocentric notions of history. In my opinion the (art) history of modernity is at once entangled and plural; it is quintessentially non-directional and encompasses considerably more, in part, spatially circumscribed phenomena than those included in the ideological concept of––Western––modernity. The study of cultural relationality, therefore, should always incorporate the study of a multiplicity of more or less extended and interconnected cultural specificities. Only on this basis can the monopolization of art history through the West really be overcome.

Notes 1 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983). 2 However, it only seems an easy task. For a criticism of current ideas of the “global contemporary” cf. Peter Osborne, “The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and Transnationality in the Atlas Group” in Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, ed. Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, 101–123 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). 3 The beginnings of the study of African history coincide with the decolonization in Africa from the 1960s onwards. See, as a major synthesis that is accessible also to non-specialists, John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). 4 John Peffer, “Notes on African Art, History, and Diasporas Within,” African Arts 38/4 (2005), 70–77, 95–96, here 70.

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5 As Peffer remarks in the article quoted, this statement refers to an overall tendency and does not disavow the fact that a substantial scholarship on single regions and topics exists; for more details, see Peffer, “Notes on African Art” (cf. note 4), 72. 6 Susanne Leeb, “Asynchronous Objects,” Texte zur Kunst 23/91 (2013), 40–61. 7 Clémentine Deliss, “Objet Atlas. Feldforschung im Museum” in Objekt Atlas. Feldforschung im Museum, ed. Clémentine Deliss, exhibition guidebook Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt am Main: Kerber, 2012), 10–33; Clémentine Deliss, “Performing the Curatorial in a Post-Ethnographic Museum” in Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art, ed. Maria Lind (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 61–72. 8 Leeb, “Asynchronous Objects” (cf. note 6), 56; see Osborne, “The Fiction of the Contemporary” (cf. note 2). 9 Leeb, “Asynchronous Objects” (cf. note 6), 56. 10 Such museums were, of course, dedicated to European art and archaeology (including sometimes, as in Berlin’s Museum Island, so-called Near Eastern art and archaeology which are assimilated to “Western” history). The only Non-European “historical” region that was acknowledged in terms of distinct museums at the beginning of the twentieth century was Eastern Asia (mainly China and Japan). 11 Leeb, “Asynchronous Objects” (cf. note 6), 56, 58. 12 Ibid., 58. 13 Osborne, “The Fiction of the Contemporary” (cf. note 2), 110–114. 14 Ibid., 109. 15 Ibid., 114. 16 I use the general term “global history” as a heading under which to subsume different historical approaches that vary in details and scale of research but have a common understanding of global history as a history of interconnectedness. For an overview, see Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Munich: Beck, 2013); specifically to entangled history (histoire croisée), see Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichten––Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002), 9–49. 17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). 18 Ethnological Museum, National Museums in Berlin. 19 The interventions were undertaken in the overall context of the special exhibition “EuropaTest” and were on show from September 2014 to October 2015. “EuropaTest” was initiated by the Humboldt Lab Dahlem, an experimental project of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) running from 2012 through 2015. My colleague Peter Junge contributed to the concept of the “Provincializing Europe” interventions. 20 The kingdom, whose origins date back to the fourteenth century, extended on both sides of the lower Congo River and had its capital in Mbanza Kongo (modern day Angola). For its history cf. esp. Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) and John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition: 1641–1718 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983). 21 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 61. The following account is based on Heywood and Thornton’s book. 22 Ibid., 185. 23 Beckx also portrayed Don Miguel’s servants Pedro Sunda and Diego Bemba dressed in Portuguese fashion. The three paintings were commissioned by Johann Moritz of Nassau, the governor of the possessions of the Dutch West India Company in Brazil. Cf. http://www.smk.dk/en/explorethe-art/highlights/jaspar-beckx-don-miguel-de-castro-emissary-of-congo/ (accessed 18 October 2014). Cf. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans (cf. note 21), 181–185. 24 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans (cf. note 21), 66. 25 Ibid., 61–67, 174–178.

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26 Minkisi not only took the form of the human, or less frequently animal, sculptures that were privileged by European collectors, but could also be pots, bags, or other receptacles containing activating “medicine” (various herbs, plants and seeds, several minerals, and earth from cemeteries, among others). 27 On minkisi, cf. especially Robert F. Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1981); Wyatt MacGaffey et al., Astonishment and Power (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000). 28 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (1985): 5–17, here 11; cf. by the same author, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res 13 (1987): 23–45, and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res 16 (1988): 105–123. The vast literature on “fetishism” includes, among many other works, KarlHeinz Kohl, Die Macht der Dinge: Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte (Munich: Beck, 2003) and Hartmut Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur: Eine andere Theorie der Moderne (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006). 29 Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur (cf. note 28), 17. 30 Peter Pels, “The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 91–121, here 94. 31 Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur (cf. note 28), 17–20. 32 “das beängstigende Andere des Eigenen … aufklären … und vor allem: wegschaffen soll”; ibid., 20 (emphasis Hartmut Böhme). Translation Sabine Lang, whom I thank for the translation of the first version of this paper. 33 Cf., among others, Anthony Shelton, ed., Fetishism: Visualising Power and Desire (London: South Bank Centre, 1995); Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London: Routledge, 2003); Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); Gabriele Genge, Artefakt––Fetisch––Skulptur: Aristide Maillol und die Beschreibung des Fremden in der Moderne (Berlin: Dt. Kunstverlag, 2009). 34 “Undoctored” here means figures that have not undergone the preparation with powerful medicines that were needed to tie non-human power to the objects. 35 Wyatt MacGaffey, “‘Magic, or as We Usually Say, Art:’ A Framework for Comparing European and African Art” in The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, ed. Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 217–235, here 223. The two figures are published in Objets interdits (Paris: Éd. Dapper, 1989), 10. 36 Peffer, “Notes on African Art” (cf. note 4), 76. 37 Cf. the exhibition catalogue: Peter Junge, ed., Kunst aus Afrika: Plastik, Performance, Design (Berlin: SMB–DuMont, 2005). 38 John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). 39 An intriguing detail is also the fact that in the case of the reliquary bust on display, relics can be found not only in the receptacle on the chest, which stores a splinter of rib behind the large mountain crystal, but also in the head: under a flap between the horns of the miter a part of the skullcap is visible. In minkisi, too, the head of figures is the part that, besides the chest and the abdomen, is most often used for storing “medicine.” 40 Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur (cf. note 28), 170–178. 41 Cf. John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo:’ African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4/2 (1993), 181–214. 42 Robert F. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), 103–159; Thompson and Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun (cf. note 27), 141–210. Specifically to pakèts congo, cf. the explanations by J. Lorand Matory in http:// sacredart.caaar.duke.edu/ (accessed 30 November 2014). 43 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 129. 44 J. Burnett, Plenty and Want (London: Thomas Nelson, 1966), quoted in Mintz, ibid., 129.

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45 The repercussion of trade on Benin politics and art are outlined especially in Paula Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1999). 46 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), Chapters 2 and 3. 47 Cf. for the following Paola Ivanov, “‘…to observe fresh life and save ethnic imprints of it.’ Bastian and Collecting Activities in Africa during the 19th and Early 20th Centuries” in Adolf Bastian and His Universal Archive of Humanity: The Origins of German Anthropology, ed. Manuela Fischer, Peter Bolz, and Susan Kamel (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007), 238–250, here 243–246. In addition to the references there, see Isabel de Castro Henriques, Percursos da modernidade em Angola (Lisbon: Inst. de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1997), 619–622; Filip de Boeck, “La frontière diamantifère angolaise et son héros mutant” in Matière à politique. Le pouvoir, le corps et les choses, ed. Jean-François Bayart and Jean-Pierre Warnier, 93–128 (Paris: Karthala, 2004).

Illustrations Fig. 1: Jaspar Beckx, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Congo, c. 1643–1650, oil on panel, 75 × 62 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, inv. KMS 7, http://www.smk.dk/en/explorethe-art/highlights/jaspar-beckx-don-miguel-de-castro-emissary-of-congo/. Fig. 2: Anonymous (Loango coast) nkisi lumweno (power figure), 19th century, wood, glass, cotton cloth, velvet, feathers, plant fibers, and other materials, 36 × 33 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, inv. III C 531 (photo: Claudia Obrocki; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum). Fig. 3: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/“Reflections: Art in the Contact Zone” and “Philosophy in the Contact Zone: Europe under the Spell of Fetishism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum (photo: Jens Zehe); in the foreground: Anonymous (stylistic place of origin: Brussels), Holy Bishop, reliquary bust, around 1520, painted oak wood, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung, inv. 2/61. Fig. 4: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/“Appropriations: Europeanism and Primitivism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum (photo: Jens Zehe); in the foreground: Saint Anthony (fig. 5); in the background: Gustav Heinrich Wolff, Lying Flora (Sternian relief ), 1924/1925, walnut, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, inv. Nr. F.V. Fig. 5: Anonymous (Kongo kingdom), Saint Anthony, 18th/19th century, wood, h 51 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, inv. III C 44072 (photo: Martin Franken, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum). Fig. 6: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/“Reflections: Art in the Contact Zone” and “Philosophy in the Contact Zone: Europe under the Spell of Fetishism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum (photo: Jens Zehe); two zinkondi (power figures) from the 19th century flank a reliquary box with an iron nail of Christ from the second half of the 18th century (a monastry work from Upper Bavaria); above in the middle an undated brass crucifix from the Kongo kingdom. Fig. 7: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/“Sweetness and Power: Entanglements of Exploitation,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum (photo: Jens Zehe); from left to right: reproduction of Frans Post, Brazilian Landscape with Manor and Sugar Mill (second half of the 17th century, Staatliches Museum Schwerin), silver sugar bowl produced in Berlin around 1765/70 and two brass commemorative heads from the Benin kingdom (c. 16th century). Fig. 8: Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/“Art and the Birth of Modernity,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum (photo: Jens Zehe); in the foreground: Chibinda Ilunga (fig. 9), in the background: reproduction of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Charlottenburg version), 1801, oil on canvas, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Schloss Charlottenburg.

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Fig. 9: Anonymous (Chokwe region, Northeastern Angola), Chibinda Ilunga, 19th century, wood, cotton fabric, hair, vegetal fibers, glass pearl, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, inv. III C 1255 (photo: Claudia Obrocki, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum).

SYLVESTER OKWUNODU OGBECHIE

Art, Nationalism, and Modernist Histories Writing Art History in Nigeria and South Africa Introduction This essay evaluates the writing of art history in Africa through comparative analysis of two seminal publications, each covering a century of artistic practice in South Africa (Pissarra et al., Visual Century, 2011), and Nigeria (Offoedu-Okeke and Ogbechie, Artists of Nigeria, 2012).1 Each book analyses the relevance of artists to national and cultural identity through artworks that reflect the complex interactions between local and global notions of modernist aesthetics. Nigerian artists framed their modernist practice in the forms, symbols, and narratives of myriad indigenous cultures, which were used as markers of authenticity in their engagement with global modernism. In contrast, South African art reflects a more generic response to African identity, and instead closely tracks global developments even during a period of international isolation in the era of apartheid. Thus while Nigerian artists assume (arguably) a natural relationship to their country’s historical past, the history of South Africa as a context of white settler colonies existing in contentious relationship with indigenous African peoples renders the South African past contentious and complicates its efforts to create an inclusive history of art. The publication of these significant books enables review of how South Africa and Nigeria generate national narratives of a modern and contemporary African art that intersects with global discourses, and how each engages the question of cultural/national relevance in artistic production. They also suggest that scholarship might benefit from comparative analysis of Nigerian and South African art, since both countries loom large in any history of modern art in Africa.

Narrating the Nation The cultural critic Homi Bhabha once noted that the idea of the nation is a narrative construct that organizes how people relate to a political and cultural location in time and place.2 According to Bhabha “nations, like narratives, lose their origin in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in their mind’s eyes.”3 Bhabha here points to the mythical nature of national narratives, which often cobbles together ideas about best ideals of the state and retrospectively reconfigures these as national history. As Stefan Berger noted, “the stories we tell each other about our national belonging and being constitute the nation. These stories change

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over time and place and are always contested, often violently so.”4 This narrative process involves the shaping of collective memories, and in the wrong contexts it can lead to “presentism, where the past only functions as confirmation of present prejudices.”5 However, “few paradigms in the realm of cultural sense production have been as powerful as the national one, and the prominence of nationalism as an ideology and social movement in the world of today testifies to its continued and global appeal.”6 Berger points out that despite the discourse of globalization, national master narratives have, in recent times, enjoyed a strong revival, often actively and ably supported by national historiographies. Modern African nations emerged largely as a result of colonization, and the idea of the nation unfolds differently in South Africa and Nigeria. In Nigeria, the idea of nation confronts the colonial past, during which British colonialism tried to construct a Nigerian colony that did not recognize its indigenous people as citizens. The Nigerian nation achieved contemporary political form through its independence from Britain in 1960 but has faltered on many fronts since then; its political processes have been compromised by military coups amidst bouts of civilian governance riddled with political crisis and pervasive corruption. As a result of these problems, Nigeria is increasingly an unstable entity largely perceived as being without control of its own economic and political future in the international context of global white supremacy.7 As V. Y. Mudimbe aptly demonstrates, the underdevelopment of formerly colonized peoples is “not only an absence of development, but also an organisational structure created under colonialism by bringing non-Western territory into the capitalist world.”8 Within this context, control of formerly colonized nations (such as Nigeria) through global capital ensures that such nations “lack the structural capacity for autonomy and sustained economic growth, since their economic fate is largely determined by the developed countries.”9 Nevertheless, the Nigerian nation anchors its contemporary relevance on claims of historical longevity, which uses its diverse artistic heritage to frame an interpretation of modern Nigeria that is posited on continuity with important ancient kingdoms such as Oyo, Benin, and Kanem-Bornu, and the canonical art of Ife, Nok, Benin and many others.10 Nigeria is also the largest country in Africa by population, which makes it a significant locale for global interrogations of black African politics and culture. The South African nation is incipient, despite having a notable history of internal developments dating back to 1910, when the British colonies in the Cape of Good Hope and Natal united with the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State to form the Union of South Africa.11 The resulting state, initially composed of Dutch and British settlers and bolstered by immigration of large numbers of Europeans in the decades after the Second World War, became essentially a bastion of settler colonies that aspired to build a white homeland for Europeans in South Africa. Despite the obvious problems of amalgamating two groups of whites (British and Dutch settlers, each with their own national agendas), the ensuing Union of South Africa nevertheless inherited an idea of its existence as a nation of white people whose heritage traces back directly to a European ancestry.12 The as-

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sumption that this nation is European rather than African produced a national narrative based on racial exclusivity, which in 1948 evolved into an apartheid regime that marginalized black South Africans and dispossessed them of their lands and resources.13 The nation constructed around this idea of white supremacy narrated South African history before the coming of the white settlers as terra nullius and redefined indigenous African blacks as foreigners in their own lands. Isolated by the international community for its apartheid policies (which discriminated against blacks and Asians in favour of whites), South African art and discourses turned inwards: “Increasingly cut off from major international art events and movements … South African art remained relatively parochial, conservative and overwhelmingly white.”14 Additionally, engagement with Western strategies of artistic expression by South African artists were read as derivative by art historians.15 South Africa’s history between 1948 and 1994 is mainly a history of increasingly militant black resistance to the apartheid regime, which culminated in a transition to majority rule in 1994. This date, marked by the election of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918–2013) as the first black president of South Africa (he served as president from 1994–1999) in the country’s first multi-racial election, is now considered to be the true beginning of South Africa’s postcolonial era. Nigeria and South Africa can therefore be described as incipient nations that are actively creating strategic narratives of nationhood through emergent art histories. Nigeria is literally writing its art history in the contemporary era, and many books are being published on the subject.16 The emergent narrative makes considerable effort to define modern Nigerian art by locating the country’s art history within its vast heritage of indigenous art and equally complex international engagements since the sixteenth century when Portuguese seafarers made contact with the Edo Kingdom of Benin.17 Conversely, the idea of the nation remains thoroughly contested in South Africa as the country grappled with its problematic political structures in the previous century. Two decades after its globally celebrated transition out of apartheid, South Africa is rewriting its art history to reconstruct and address an earlier racially prejudiced narrative that defined South African art as only those works produced by white artists, which was largely seen both locally and internationally as a regional aesthetic of a European diaspora context. Artists of Nigeria and Visual Century are therefore two books engaged in significant acts of inscription: writing national histories of art and visual culture in terms of each nation’s specific engagements with modernism in local and global contexts. What kinds of art history narratives emerge from this effort, and how does each book deal with the location of its context in the global discourse of art history?

Writing Art History in Nigeria Over the past three decades, significant art exhibitions and curatorial interventions have brought modern and contemporary African art to global purview. The curatorial practice of Okwui Enwezor has been most notable in this emergence but

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many other important scholars and curators have contributed.18 Important publications folded the histories of modern Nigerian and South African art into broader histories of modern art in Africa. Significant among these are Clémentine Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (1995) and Okwui Enwezor, The Short Century (2001), both edited volumes that contain brief histories of modern Nigerian and South African art, along with anthologies of primary texts on modernity in art produced by artists and intellectuals from both regions.19 Other continental overviews include books by Marshall Ward Mount, Jean Kennedy, Kojo Fosu, Ulli Beier, the anthology produced by N’Goné Fall and Jean Loup Pivin, and the influential exhibition catalogue produced by Susan Vogel for Africa Explores.20 In addition, efforts to write comprehensive or particular histories of modern art in Nigerian and South African art unfolded alongside these continental overviews, and these shall prove more relevant to our analysis. The texts discussed in the two sections that follow are drawn from a vast pool of publications on art in Nigeria and South Africa. In Nigeria, Aina Onabolu wrote the first text to focus on the history and development of modern art. Titled A Short Discourse on Art (1920), the pamphlet represents Onabolu’s attempt to credentialize his art practice by linking it to a wider European history of painting dating back to the English painter Joshua Reynolds.21 Onabolu used the text as a corrective to prevailing ideas, created by the British colonial establishment, that Africans were innately incapable of producing pictorially sound artworks such as portraits. Onabolu positioned himself as heir to the pictorial tradition of Western academic painting in his appropriation of the British academic art he encountered through the colonial context. This pamphlet is important for its affirmation of an emergent Nigerian/African sensibility to the broad transformations of indigenous African cultures by the colonial encounter, and what Onabolu perceived as the role of the artist in creating and defining a new culture of art. In this regard, Onabolu was an avant-garde artist who tried to position the black subject within a general narrative of art history. Analyses of modern Nigerian art often chart the transition of Nigerian artists from indigenous cultural practices to contemporary modes of expression but rarely investigate its location within international discourses of modern art.22 Too often, “[i]n these triumphal narratives, artists succeed in championing a uniquely … Nigerian … art by appropriating populist indigenous idioms in their modernist abstract painting, prints and sculptures.”23 The history of modern African art abounds in such triumphal narratives, the apex of which can be seen in the various entries in Deliss (1995).24 Uche Okeke published an influential anthology charting a chronology of developments in modern Nigerian art dating to the work of pioneer Aina Onabolu.25 Okeke highlighted the role of art schools in this process, with particular attention paid to the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria where in 1958, several students came together to form the Zaria Art Society, which spawned a major postcolonial movement in modern Nigerian art. Ola Oloidi (1984) wrote a notable history of modern Nigerian art from 1900 to 196026 and published articles on the subject in several journals.27 In 1993, Janet

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Stanley and Bernice Kelly published an anthology that provided the first broad documentation of important modern Nigerian artists and art movements.28 Canonical narratives of modern Nigerian art are usually found as a background narrative in books and articles dealing with particular artists or art movements, written by authors such as Simon Ottenberg and Nkiru Nzegwu, Moyo Okediji, Dele Jegede, Olu Oguibe, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, among others.29 Too often, such narratives “focus on particular individuals or generations of artists, or on notable art schools that formed cultural enclaves supposedly endowed with stylistic uniqueness.”30 As a result of this divergent focus, the general histories of modern Nigerian art produced by scholars tend to be fragmented, sectarian, and factional. It is this fragmentation that Artists of Nigeria sets out to remedy in its 685-page tome (full disclosure: I co-wrote and edited this book, reworking a manuscript produced by Onyema Offoedu-Okeke into its final form and overseeing all facets of its production). The culmination of a six-year research project, Artists of Nigeria evaluates the history and development of modern Nigerian art by analysing its most significant artists, art movements, and schools. The original research for the book was commissioned by the Ford Foundation, which pegs it as a development project in the realm of art and visual culture. Adhiambo Odaga (Ford Foundation representative to West Africa during the book’s production) confirms that the Ford Foundation played a major role in shepherding this important book to its completion, in keeping with its mandate to advance African-led development (fig. 1).31 Artists of Nigeria is divided into sections that construct a chronology of art in Nigeria during the long twentieth century from 1850 to 2010. The first part of the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the history, themes, and principal orientations of Nigerian art. General essays that review important developments, identify notable art schools and movements, and document selected artists precede each subsequent section. These essays present important information in a concise format and frame the documentation of artists that follow. The general introduction (“Headstreams and Tributaries”), presents the book’s objective as an effort to describe “the different indigenous art systems and responses to modernity that influenced the development of modern and contemporary Nigerian art.”32 It provides a general overview of modern Nigerian art, defines basic terms, and lays out a basic argument that is taken up in the rest of the book — that modern Nigerian art draws from a deep well of indigenous and foreign influences. Artists of Nigeria argues that although “the modern state of Nigeria was established in 1914 through colonial fiat … the Nigerian nation did not emerge simply from this singular act of unification. Nigerian modernism was created from societies already in the throes of modernisation from the mid-19th century onwards.”33 The third (“Allegories of Nigerian Modernity”) and fourth (“The Colonial Era”) sections of Artists of Nigeria provide a series of frameworks for interpreting the idea of modernity in Nigerian art. They highlight the vast and valuable artistic heritage of Nigeria and posit that modern Nigerian art gets its vitality from the foundation of significant form provided by this illustrious heritage. They contest the art histor-

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Fig. 1: Onyema Offoedu-Okeke, Artists of Nigeria (Milan: 5 Continents, 2012)

ical marginalization of modern African art in the discourse of art history and lay out criteria of analysis divided into enigmatic headers such as genera, media, style, technique, subject matter, influence, progressiveness, and trans-avant-garde. They also introduce the vital role of Lagos in shaping the history of modern Nigerian art. As Nigeria’s largest urban metropolis it is the primary location of the most important elements in this national narrative: a critical mass of collectors, art galleries, and networks of important local and foreign institutions that supported modern Nigerian artists. Artists of the colonial era showcased in this section include Aina Onabolu, Akinola Lasekan, Ben Enwonwu, Susanne Wenger, and Lamidi Fakeye. Onabolu is highlighted for his pioneering role as the first person to receive formal art training in Nigeria and his indefatigable efforts to introduce art education into Nigerian schools. Lasekan was the first Nigerian artist to represent the quotidian existence of Nigerian peoples in his art, as well as being the first cartoonist in the country’s history. Ben Enwonwu was the first Nigerian (and first black artist) to gain a global reputation as a modern artist through his extraordinary career and professional practice that unfolded in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Enwonwu’s international career offered a vision of glamorous professional practice that helped validate art as a respectable profession in postcolonial Nigeria. His art was also inserted into a transnational pan-African struggle for African emancipation from colonial rule in which African nationalists, black British subjects, and African American anti-segregationists all co-opted the artist as a major figure of global black aspiration. Lamidi Fakeye transformed an indigenous lineage heritage of Yoruba sculpture into a global contemporary art through his internationally acclaimed practice

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as a sculptor who, despite being a Muslim, became a major producer of images for Christian churches and Yoruba traditional religion. Susanne Wenger’s presence on this list indicates Artists of Nigeria’s interest in expanding the definition of Nigerian artist to include foreigners whose art and professional career unfolded in Nigeria. Wenger emigrated from Graz, Austria and her work with the Oshogbo school over a period of five decades locates her firmly as a Nigerian artist. She became a naturalized Nigerian citizen and was buried with great fanfare in Oshogbo when she passed away in 2010. A subsequent section of Artists of Nigeria profiles El Anatsui, another transnational artist and a major figure in the Nsukka School, who hails from Ghana but has lived in Nigeria for almost four decades. The remaining chapters group Nigerian artists together on a broad chronological basis and provide important analysis of each artist. The total list includes 110 artists working in a variety of styles and media both inside and outside the country. The sections on each artist includes a photograph of the artist, identification of his or her primary medium (painter, sculptor, photographer, etc., although Artists of Nigeria specifies that many work in more than one medium), and an essay containing biographical information and a list of exhibitions. Key examples of each artist’s works are illustrated and narrated according to their use of references from indigenous and modern artistic forms, reflecting a prevailing idea of synthesis that framed most analysis of modern Nigerian art in the twentieth century. From the evidence of artworks illustrated in the book, modern Nigerian art is largely figurative, although interpretations of the figure range from naturalistic to fairly abstract. The ideology of Synthesis (which advocates amalgamation of the best ideals of indigenous and Western art to create a unique modern Nigerian art) is easily perceived in the artists’ appropriation of cultural motifs and symbols, most notably in art produced by the Nsukka School, who adopted Uli painting and indigenous calligraphic scripts as a framework for contemporary art.34 As the narrative moves towards the end of the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century, Artists of Nigeria documents a rapid proliferation of non-figurative work and an expansion of media from painting and sculpture into photography, new media, and installation art. This divergence is notable in the work of Nnena Okorie and Victor Ekpuk, who both live and work in the United States. By including their works, as well as that of Yinka Shonibare MBE who is based in the United Kingdom, Artists of Nigeria stakes out a broad claim for the globalization of modern Nigerian art, which echoes the international orientation of pioneer Nigerian artists––Onabolu, Lasekan and Enwonwu–– all of whom trained in the United Kingdom at specific points in their career. Artists of Nigeria differs from all previous histories of modern Nigerian art with its expansive and inclusive documentation, cogent analysis, and plethora of illustrations of relevant artworks in full colour. This already transcends earlier efforts by satisfying a need for basic information about the history of artists and art movements in modern Nigerian art. It enhances the international visibility of the artists included, since their works can now be inserted into global narratives of modern art practice and are increasingly represented in various art auctions. The book also made concerted efforts to include and highlight the works of Nigerian women

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artists, who were usually marginalized in previous publications. Despite this, Artists of Nigeria is lopsided in its representation: male artists predominate, although Ndidi Dike, the most important woman artist of her generation, receives detailed treatment. Female artists comprise a small fraction of the total number (11 women out of 110 artists), which can be explained by the book’s focus on academic art production within the gallery system. Outside this context (i.e. in the overall evaluation of art production in Nigeria) women easily outnumber men, but analysis of that larger occurrence awaits a different publication.

Writing Art History in South Africa The nation, according to Benedict Anderson, “is an imagined political community…and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”35 The malleable nature of the idea of nation is central to this formulation and frames both its political order and the perception of who belongs to, or is excluded from the imagined commons. As T. J. Clark noted, “what Anderson wanted to clarify were the conditions of production of imagined communities of the new kind. What technologies of representation did they depend on? And who did the representing?”36 In the case of South Africa, the nation and its discourse on art were imagined as white. The writing of art history in South Africa was therefore implicated in a politics of representation, which underlines the immense shifts in narrative focus before and after the demise of apartheid. Many books published in the period of white supremacy rarely included blacks in their account of South African art, while a plethora of books published since 1994 make considerable effort to write black South Africans back into the nation’s history.37 Visual Century endeavours to write a new history that presents a broad overview of twentieth-century South African art. It is not specifically concerned with writing in (unwritten) black artists, as much of this work has been done through retrospective exhibitions and catalogues; rather, it provides a deep reading of important aspects of South African art through an inclusive account of the significant intersections between local and global contexts (fig. 2). The question, “What is a South African artist?” has been the focus of many histories of art in this context. Notable books on the subject include Esmé Berman’s Art & Artists of South Africa, a comprehensive history that documents hundreds of artists working in a variety of media from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary era.38 According to Janet Stanley, the “vast majority of artists, art movements, and training centres treated by Berman refer to the white art establishment although not exclusively so.”39 Entries for individual artists include basic biographical data, a list of major exhibitions and public collections, and a summary of the artists’ life and work all supported by copious illustrations. Since its original publication in 1970, the critically acclaimed book has been updated and generally lauded as a standard reference work on the subject. The art historical value of Berman’s text lies in its serious survey of art in South Africa, which distinguishes it from other publications with narrower focus that were often directed towards the art market such as Tai Collard (1998).

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Fig. 2: Lize van Robbroeck, ed., Visual Century: South African Art in Context, vol. 2 (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 2011)

Most surveys since then have been qualified either by limiting their historical framework or by being representative of particular collections, race, gender, media, or theme such as Elizabeth Rankin (1994), Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal (1996), Sophie Perryer (2004), Michael Godby (2007) and Williamson (2009).40 Williamson’s numerous publications point to her role as an interlocutor for South African art, although her anthologies have been criticized for a lack of in-depth scholarship in service of what the critic Antoinette du Plessis describes as “perpetuating a meaningless quest for identifying a ‘national identity’ for South African art.”41 Earlier anthologies of South African art mirror the reality of a context that was dominated by whites until recently, mainly because black artists were excluded from formal art education and representation in the gallery system. Hans Fransen (1982) sums up the dire situation for black artists in this period: “Black art exists almost exclusively by virtue of white liberals’ benign interest. Teachers are white, art administrators are white, gallery directors are white, and so are the critics and buyers.”42 Nevertheless, white liberals provided significant artistic and professional opportunities for blacks despite apartheid’s crippling restrictions. For example, Steven Sack (1988) produced a retrospective exhibition of black South African art whose catalogue is one of the first significant books on the subject.43 Several other publications have documented efforts to create spaces of practice for black artists during the apartheid era, while the post-apartheid period has seen an explosion of publications that analyse black South African art. E.J. De Jager (1973) was the first attempt to publish a substantial book on black South African art, and this work was updated in De Jager (1992).44 Elza Miles (1997) is important here for her groundbreaking study of black artists, forming a scaffold for Hayden Proud (2005), which, though focused on a private collection, represents the most accomplished enuncia-

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tion of the “neglected tradition” strain of texts that seek to recover the role of blacks in South African art.45 John Peffer (2009) engages similar issues in a thematic study with wide scope and depth of analysis.46 Mario Pissarra points out that a revisionist art history began in earnest around 1986 with a great number of exhibitions and publications focused on neglected black artists.47 In this regard, the influential exhibition Liberated Voices (1999) marked a change in the tenor of South African art history with its inclusiveness and representation of diverse media of contemporary art.48 This period also saw a resurgent focus on analysis of important art centres/workshops such as Rorke’s Drift, a significant context for South African printmaking,49 and the Thupelo Workshop, which “aside from its stated purpose as a venue for black artists to widen their scope of expression, [was also] a historic point of intersection for a number of local and international audiences.”50 This effort to read blacks back into South African art history unfolds alongside similar initiatives to recover the role of women artists as seen in Marion Arnold’s (1996) pioneering feminist text, and in the well-conceptualized and excellently written survey edited by Marion Arnold and Brenda Schahmann (2005).51 The list of publications discussed above affirms the existence of a viable discourse of art in South Africa. Visual Century builds upon this antecedence of revisionist scholarship for its overview of South African art from 1907 to 2007. Gavin Jantjes, a Norway-based South African artist, initiated the Visual Century project and, jointly with Mario Pissarra of Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI52), brought together its editors (Jillian Carman, Lize van Robbroeck, Mario Pissarra, Tehmbinkosi Goniwe, and Mandisi Majavu) and contributors. Produced in a boxed set of four volumes for a total of 950 pages, the book is multi-authored with each volume overseen by one editor––except for the fourth volume, which has three editors. The Visual Century project was announced on social media with a YouTube podcast that provided a preview of the book.53 Its opening shot shows the boxed set from which each individual volume emerges. Against a background rendering of the pan-African anthem Nkosi Sikelel’ Afrika, the trailer scrolled a statement by Nelson Mandela: The history of our country is characterized by too much forgetting. A forgetting which served the powerful and disposed the weak … One of our challenges as we build and extend democracy is the need to ensure that our youth know where we come from, what we have done to break the shackles of oppression, and how we have pursued the journey to freedom and dignity for all.54

The trailer asserts that “history makes a nation” and urged the viewer to “discover 100 years of Art History” in the four volumes of the Visual Century book. The sophisticated YouTube video points to the international marketing of the book, which is positioned as a significant intervention in the global discourse of art history. Visual Century divides its analysis of South African art into four broad time periods, such that even though it carried out a fairly notable chronological survey, each period was discussed less in terms of a formal movement from one date to

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another and more as a thematic study of the different elements that shaped each period: Volume 1: 1907–1948, edited by Jillian Carman, covers the period from the Anglo-Boer war to the rise of the Afrikaner nationalist regime; Volume 2: 1945– 1976, edited by Lize van Robbroeck, evaluates the period from the end of the Second World War to the Soweto uprisings; Volume 3: 1973–1992, edited by Mario Pissarra, focuses on the transitional era of the struggle for majority rule; Volume 4: 1990–2007, edited by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Mario Pissarra, and Mandisi Majavu, focuses on the advent of democracy in South Africa through analysis of significant trends in post-apartheid art. Each volume also contains a timeline that provides a snapshot of events “to stimulate reflection on the relationship between art and its broader context, as well as between South Africa and the world at large.”55 The Volume 1 editor, Jillian Carman, notes that the essays in Visual Century often overlap because they “address the same historical continuum from differing perspectives, the aim being to provide a complex, layered, questioning analysis of the period, rather than an authoritative history from one viewpoint.”56 One might argue that this kind of layered, nuanced reading is made possible by the existence of prior publications that provide for South African art the kind of documentation found in Artists of Nigeria. In the preface to all four volumes, project director Gavin Jantjes suggests, “One can picture the history of South Africa’s art as a river meandering through the southernmost part of the African continent … towards the estuary of the present [that] connects to the history of the world’s art.”57 The contributors acknowledge South Africa’s divergent histories of modern art. Therefore, “The task of the Visual Century project has been to grapple with the uneven flow of South African contemporary art; to contextualize the relevance of artists and their works to the nation’s cultural identity, and, where possible, to place them in relation to the history of international art.”58 By linking the choice of 1907 as a start date for the first volume to the production of Pablo Picasso’s seminal painting Desmoiselles d’Avignon in Paris, Visual Century reminds us that for most of the twentieth century South African art history was narrated as the history of a European diaspora in Africa. Jill Carman points out that in the early twentieth century, the artists and art world of South Africa looked to the West for inspiration and validation.59 She notes, however, that the emergence of a white history of art proceeded in fits and starts, rather than coming into being fully formed. “The period from 1907 to 1948 was characterized by the struggle for national identity, which became increasingly divisive in the white population”60 and it pitted English-speaking settlers of British origin against the Dutch-descended Boer Afrikaners. However, both white communities were united in opposing the rise of Black Nationalism. The repressive political order that came out of the union of white South Africa frustrated black artists and eventually led pioneering figures, such as Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto, to emigrate to Paris. Mancoba became a member of the European avant-garde art movement CoBrA, while Sekoto ultimately enjoyed popularity in South Africa as attention gradually shifted to the practice of black artists within its contested national histories. Salah

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Hassan notes the ironic situation that despite his importance, “Mancoba’s achievements have not received the critical recognition they deserve, and [he] has remained sidelined in art historical texts on twentieth-century art.”61 The efforts made by various Visual Century contributors to point out how earlier history marginalized black South Africans only served to reinforce their irrelevance to the grand narrative of manifest destiny that framed white settlements in that historical period. Because of this, the authors in Visual Century struggled to frame as a corrective their investigation of earlier narratives of whiteness in South African art history. As the British cultural critic Rasheed Araeen noted, “South Africa has inherited not an integrated single heritage, but fragments of a divided society. The task of historians is then not only to reclaim these fragments and re-assemble them into one history.”62 We may therefore read Mandela’s declaration above, on the importance of historical memory in national narratives, as a charter for the book, one which identifies Visual Century as a classic revisionist project that aims to restore to contemporary South Africa a history of art inclusive of all South Africans and also takes cognisance of its international engagements. This objective requires that Visual Century provide a history that does not demonize white artists or marginalize black artists, and Volume 1 takes up this task with gusto. Jill Carman sets the stage for an “interrogation of art and its histories in South Africa by examining the social complexities of the period and the impact historical events had on art practice … by interrogating past assumptions and bringing together topics that are often treated separately.”63 Lize van Robbroeck’s analysis of the emergence of the first modern black painters highlights how George Pemba, Gerard Sekoto, and Ernest Mancoba (among others) negotiated the complex socio-political and intellectual context of emerging African nationalism in the tense political climate of the period after proclamation of the Union in 1910.64 This is followed by Melanie Hillebrand’s analysis of white colonial artists of the pre-apartheid era, which shows that their engagements with modern art unfolded with significant contestation between “artists defending the status quo of classical Western painting and members of the New Group, an artists’ collective that challenged the prevailing taste for conservative art.”65 Hillebrand concludes that despite “the opportunities afforded to hundreds, even thousands of white artists, only a handful of names have survived as being of national significance.”66 These include Jacob Pierneef, Bertha Everard, Gregoire Boonzaier, and Irma Stern. Similar juxtapositions characterize the rest of the book, such as Volume 2, which covers the crucial period of apartheid from the end of the Second World War to the Soweto uprisings. Here Frederico Freschi’s article on Afrikaner Nationalism’s impact on high art, dialogues with Lize van Robbroeck’s analysis of race and art in apartheid South Africa. Hazel Friedman reviews the ideological occlusions and contradictions in the largely apolitical art produced during these politically fraught years.67 Elizabeth Rankin’s analysis of the influence of art centres and workshops on South African art dialogues with Sandra Klopper’s evaluation of the traditional– modernity dialectic in the art and sartorial styles of South African migrant labourers (both articles show how black artists made a life despite inimical conditions).

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Christine Eyene reviews how the condition of exile became “a predicament facing an intelligentsia comprising various racial groups in the period after the Soweto uprisings,” though she noted that many of the artists who fled South Africa were black.68 Volume 2 concludes with Anitra Nettleton’s discussion of primitivism in South African art, through which references to and generalizations about the formal qualities of indigenous African art became a major feature of the styles of artists working in a primitivist mode during the apartheid period. These include Cecil Skotnes, Walter Battiss, Edoardo Villa, Sydney Kumalo, and Dumile Feni. Lize van Robbroeck notes that “as was the case for numerous modern artists from the newly independent African colonies, a nascent nationalism underlay the excavation of African traditions for South Africa’s black artists; while for white artists, ‘the primitive’ constituted a quintessentially modernist means of accessing the unconscious and challenging normative social and sexual taboos.”69 Volume 3, the core of the book, covers the period from 1973 to 1992, which were the years of resistance and the period of transition to majority rule. Mario Pissarra’s introduction points out that since a lot of artworks from this period engaged the era’s prevailing politics, “it is perhaps not surprising that the popular image of art in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s is indelibly tied to images of resistance, and to the notion of resistance art itself.”70 According to Pissarra, this pervasive characterization fails to interrogate the numerous ways in which, apart from the use of militant subject matter, resistance expressed itself in artworks from that period. He concludes with a warning that “Presupposing resistance art to be dominant and homogenous erases the instances of conscious collusion with state interests that did occur, and conceals the grey areas between resistance and collusion, including unwitting co-option into state projects and disengagements with the broader struggle for liberation.”71 The political and cultural situation of this era, Pissarra suggests, is not easily resolved into contestation between “good” black oppressed and “bad” white oppressors. Volume 3 therefore expands on the original intention of Visual Century, which was to provide a complex, layered, and questioning analysis of South African art. Nevertheless, 1973 to 1992 was a key period of struggle against the apartheid regime, and many articles evaluate artistic responses to the struggle within analysis of political and social turmoil. These include Sipho Mdanda’s exploration of how the quotidian indignities of apartheid became a major theme in South African art, focusing on the impact of segregation and inequality on daily lives rather than heroic gestures of resistance. Documentary photography also played an important role in this regard, and Mdanda discusses the photography of David Goldblatt and Paul Alberts alongside paintings by Durant Sihlali, Paul Stopforth, and Helen Sebidi. His article dialogues with Emile Maurice’s analysis of images of conflict and confrontation in the art of that period, which reflects a popular idea that artists were, as Gavin Janjtes put it, “freedom fighters on the battlefield of culture.”72 Ruth Simbao evaluates the visual construction of “Africanness” and “blackness” during apartheid, attempting to open up a space for a broader understanding of notions of resistance that do not necessarily fit within the parameters of typical resistance art.

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Judy Seidman reviews the visual arts of the South African cultural workers movement, while Hayden Proud and Roger van Wyck both interrogate the forms of contemporary South African art that tracked international developments in modernism and conceptualism. Mario Pissarra rounds out the volume by reviewing the effect on art of the international campaign to isolate South Africa. He explores the divergent responses of artists who stayed in the country and those who left as a result of the cultural boycott. Volume 4 concludes the book by charting, according to Sarat Maharaj, “the historic passage out of apartheid to the South Africa taking shape in its wake.”73 In their introduction to the volume, Mandisi Majavu and Mario Pissarra suggest that Visual Century’s value lies in “its ability to stimulate fresh and critical perspectives, disrupting the reductive orthodoxies that … either simplify art by reducing it to mere reflection of its context, or treat it as an autonomous field oblivious to broader issues.”74 The authors in this section are Gavin Jantjes, Colin Richards, Gabeba Baderoon, Mgcineni Sophoba, Karhtyn Smith, Zayd Minty, and Andries Oliphant. Their essays largely eschew triumphalist narratives since, as Maharaj suggests, historical experience across the century has left South Africans wary of the idea of nation.

Art, Nationalism, and Modernist Histories It is worth reiterating that both Artists of Nigeria and Visual Century are engaged in significant acts of inscription––to write histories of Nigerian and South African art in terms of their engagements with local and global forces. The documentary framework of Artists of Nigeria differs from the thematic framework of Visual Century, but what really distinguishes them from one another is the specific analysis of history of art in each context. Nigeria is politically and culturally important to African history because of its large black population and rich cultural heritage. Artists of Nigeria’s narrative therefore emphasizes the role of indigenous culture and individual agency in the emergence of modern Nigerian art within an overview of British colonial power, which unilaterally created the nation by amalgamating a diverse range of ethnic groups (over 250 languages are spoken in the country). British efforts to develop settler colonies failed in Nigeria, and a nationalist struggle for self-determination, which had its origins in the nineteenth century before the imposition of colonial rule, eventually led to political independence in 1960.75 Subsequently, Nigeria has played a major role in global African affairs despite ongoing political and economic instability. Furthermore, the flow of Nigerians into the international arena has led to a significant Nigerian diaspora that has scored major successes in various fields of endeavour. Nigerian critics, curators, and artists are very well represented in discourses of art and visual culture, and have helped shape the global reception of contemporary African art.76 On the other hand, Visual Century’s analysis of South African art highlights the divergent impulses of its black and white artists while crafting a new and inclusive narrative of its unique

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and complex history. Above all, it proceeds in full awareness that “the knowledges produced about art in this country during the twentieth century were simultaneously produced by, and productive of, the dominant power relations that contaminated every aspect of the South African life-world.”77 Although Artists of Nigeria’s focus on individual artists differs from Visual Century’s thematic focus, the two books share some interesting similarities. Both are implicated in the production of national canons of art, with all the problems inherent in such efforts. They also compare the context of national art history in their respective countries to rivers, describing the particularities of each country’s diverse strands of creative engagement as tributaries that pool together to create a mighty flowing strand of national art. This description continues a useful metaphor that was adopted by previous authors to describe the disparate impulses in modern African art.78 Of course, the idea of history as a flowing river dates back much further in relation to African and African diaspora matters to Langston Hughes’ 1922 canonical poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers (“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins; my soul has grown deep like the rivers”).79 Incidentally, Hughes, an avant-garde poet of the Harlem Renaissance, heralded a period of change in which African-Americans rewrote the history of blacks in America. Observing this process (the writing of history) at work in Artists of Nigeria and Visual Century is instructive. The narrative of modern and contemporary Nigerian art put forward in Artists of Nigeria highlights the complex influences that have shaped the creativity of Nigerian artists and the role of specific Nigerian contexts, such as Lagos, in defining the idea of modern Nigerian art. In all instances, Artists of Nigeria stresses the national and cultural specificity of its artists as Nigerians. Even though there have been white interlocutors relevant to the history of modern Nigerian art (Ulli Beier and Suzanne Wenger for example), Artists of Nigeria locates agency with Nigerians themselves and highlights their role in defining and managing a culture-specific yet globally oriented idea of modernity in African art in the long twentieth century. This ranges from the photography of the nineteenth-century Nigerian photographer Jonathan Adagogo Green (who, despite not being included in the book is arguably Nigeria’s first modern artist) through the pioneers Aina Onabolu and Ben Enwonwu, to the contemporary artists of early twenty-first century Nigeria. Visual Century’s narrative of South African art faced the greater challenge of producing a history of white and black agency in a country that, until 1994, segregated and marginalized blacks in all spheres of national life. Nation is narration, said Homi Bhabha, and the national history promoted by South Africa during apartheid mainly narrated it as an outpost of European culture, a European diaspora. This accords well with V. Y. Mudimbe’s assertion that “colonists (those settling a region) and colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs.”80 Consequently, Visual Century investigates what Bhabha describes as “the nation-space in the process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in media res; and the

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image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught uncertainly, in the act of composing its powerful image.”81 Visual Century composes a new image for the nation by narrating the history of South African art as a transcending of political and cultural differences. That this history was, until recently, headed in a more catastrophic direction can be seen in Bhabha’s lament in a text written in 1990, mourning those who “had not yet found their nation: amongst them … the Black South Africans.”82 Two decades later, Visual Century posits that black South Africans were, and have always been, part of the nation, despite apartheid’s efforts to write them out of the nation’s history. A certain element of sanitization is evident in the process of rewriting history, and this is perhaps inevitable. Acts of inscription are by nature political acts, especially in this instance when writing art history foregrounds the political framework of the nation state as a guiding principle. Visual Century raises an interesting issue of what South Africa’s national identity means and what its very existence means to the idea of Africa. However, the unilateral narrative presented in Visual Century omits some questions of fundamental importance: How does South African art relate to the history of art in Sub-Saharan Africa, or Africa in general? Volume 4 charts in meticulous detail the internationalization of South African art since its inception, but the authors in Visual Century make remarkably minimal reference to other African countries. In contrast, many of the articles enunciate the links between South Africa and the West, often linking developments in South African art to comparable Western antecedents. Given the rapid reintegration of white South African art into global discourses, one wonders whether South African art achieves global relevance because it mainly tells the story of white intervention in Africa. This raises a valid question: Is South Africa really an African country or a European diaspora country in Africa? One might respond that this distinction is meaningless in the context of globalization, but South Africa has grappled with this issue for most of its history. Despite majority black rule in post-apartheid South Africa, the protocols of South Africa’s integration into the global economy seems to favour its white population excessively. This produces a schizophrenic attitude in which the country’s business interests increasingly reach into most African economies while its social and cultural focus is resolutely oriented to the West. Also, the post-apartheid period has not produced expected improvements in the economic conditions of most South African blacks. As Andries Oliphant noted, “the democratisation of South Africa has … not inaugurated a post-colonial utopia; rather, it has lurched from apartheid to the brink of a fullblown dystopia. Haunted by violent crime, a health pandemic, unemployment, intolerance, xenophobia and a plethora of other social, economic and environmental ills”.83 South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, and it seems the overall economic condition of blacks has worsened since 1994. Is South Africa’s ongoing gross inequality implicated in this attempt to rewrite the nation’s art history; if so, what should be the role of art history narratives in this context? Finally, the composition of artists and authors in Visual Century highlights the paucity of black artists and scholars in South African art and its discourses. As Lize

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van Robbroeck noted in Volume 2, “inevitably, a disproportionate number of artists featured … are white, as are the majority of the authors. This points not only to the hegemonic normativity of whiteness during the apartheid era, but also demonstrates the severe shortage of black art historians in the ‘new South Africa’––a legacy of the past that, one can only hope, will be addressed sooner rather than later.”84 Visual Century does an impressive job of addressing this issue; unfortunately, much remains to be done.

Conclusion Modern African art had until recently received the least attention from art historians and other scholars of African art. This situation derived from a widespread misconception that contemporary African art was a distorted copy of Western artistic traditions and therefore lacking in authenticity.85 Artists of Nigeria and Visual Century categorically refute this canard though impressive documentation of the vibrant and divergent modernist impulses in twentieth-century Nigerian and South African art. We may therefore conclude by questioning the meaning of their efforts to narrate the nation through a history of art. James Elkins argues that “the patent nationalism of individual art histories” is a cogent argument against the idea that art history is global, since its form is often shaped by local concerns. Artists of Nigeria and Visual Century both indicate it is not pointless to try to define the nation through its artists, and that the search for a national identity in art is not a useless atavism in the age of globalization. In this they agree with Jan Vansina that the goal of art history is to “examine the idiosyncrasy of the object (artwork) in comparison to others, that is the conditions, circumstances and quality of its creation both internal and external [in order to place] the object in a general framework of the evolution of similar and related art forms.”86 More importantly, “New work must continue to contextualize cultural practice in more precise localities, but also seek to capture how artistic practices are claim-making strategies within a shifting web of new and old forms of territoriality.”87 This process allows for distinctions based on different criteria that can incorporate artworks of all types and historical periods, and it also allows for the kind of cultural specificity that distinguishes these two extraordinary publications. Their expansive examination of modern art in Nigeria and South Africa demonstrates the kind of layered scholarship that is needed to fully recognize Africa’s contributions to modernist developments in the global history of art.

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Notes 1 Mario Pissarra, Jillian Carman, Lize van Robbroeck, Thembinkosi Goniwe, and Mandisi Majavu, eds., Visual Century: South African Art in Context (Johannesburg: Univ. of the Witwatersrand, 2011); Onyema Offoedu-Okeke and Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, eds., Artists of Nigeria (Milan: 5 Continents, 2012). 2 Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990). 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock, eds., Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 2. 5 Ibid., 3. 6 Ibid., 1. 7 See, for example, Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing, 2000); Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis (New York: Basic Books, 2011); and John Campbell, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). In recent years, Nigeria has also faced a debilitating insurgency by the militant Islamic group Boko Haram. 8 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988), 3. 9 Ibid. 10 For a brief overview of Nigerian art, see Ekpo Eyo, Two Thousand Years of Nigerian Art (Lagos: Federal Department of Antiquities, 1977). 11 John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv−xvi. 12 The brief history of South Africa summarized here inevitably glosses over complicated political and social issues, including the presence of immigrants from Asia whose story is an integral aspect of the evolving political landscape of that period. For details of important political and cultural events of this period, see “Timelines 1907–1948” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 1, 198−210. 13 For a comprehensive history, see David Welsh, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2009). 14 Lize van Robbroeck, “Introduction: Art in White and Black” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 2, 2–7, here 3. 15 Paraphrased from Partha Mitter, “Interventions: Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90/4 (2008), 531–548, here 537. Mitter was referring to the history of South Asian artists’ adoption of Western strategies of artistic expression, but the statement equally applies to the general reception of modern African art in art history. 16 See, for example, Jess Casellote, ed., Contemporary Nigerian Art in Lagos Private Collections (Lagos: Bookcraft, 2012). 17 For an overview of the history of modern Nigerian art, see Offoedu-Okeke and Ogbechie, Artists of Nigeria, 12–17. The Portuguese made contact with the Edo Kingdom in 1482; their interaction produced hybrid artworks, such as the Afro-Portuguese ivories, and led to new aesthetics in the Benin kingdom. These artworks are analysed in Ezio Bassani and William B. Fagg, eds., Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory (New York: Center for African Art, 1988). 18 Such as Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, N’Goné Fall, Simon Njami, and Bisi Silva. 19 Clementine Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (London: Whitechapel, 1995); Okwui Enwezor, ed., The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945−1994 (New York: Prestel, 2001). See also Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art since 1980 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009). 20 Marshall Ward Mount, African Art: The Years since 1920 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), Jean Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), Kojo Fosu, 20th Century Art of Africa (Zaria: Gaskiya, 1986), Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1968), N’Goné Fall and Jean Loup Pivin, eds., An Anthology of African Art: the Twentieth Century (Paris: Revue Noire, 2002), Susan Vogel, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: Center for African Art, 1991).

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21 Aina Onabolu, A Short Discourse on Art (Lagos: Aina Onabolu, 1920). 22 For criticism of the shortcomings of this template, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Revolution and Evolution in Modern Nigerian art: Myths and Realities” in Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Modern African Arts, ed. Nkiru Nzegwu (Binghamton: ISSA, 1999), 121−138. 23 Prita Meier, “Authenticity and its Modernist Discontents: The Colonial Encounter and African and Middle Eastern Art History,” The Arab Studies Journal 18/1 (Spring 2010), 12−45, here 30. 24 See especially Chika Okeke’s “The Quest: From Zaria to Nsukka” in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clementine Deliss (London: Whitechapel, 1995), 41−75. For a critique of Okeke’s triumphalist narrative, see Sylvester Ogbechie, “Exhibiting Africa: Curatorial Attitudes and the Politics of Representation in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa,” African Arts 30/1 (Winter 1997), 10, 12, 83−84. 25 Uche Okeke, Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo: Asele Institute and Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982). See also Uche Okeke, “History of Modern Nigerian Art,” Nigeria Magazine 128–129 (1979), 100−118. 26 Ola Oloidi, Modern Nigerian Art: Implementation, Growth and Development from 1900 to 1960 (PhD dissertation, Nsukka Univ. of Nigeria, 1984). 27 See Ola Oloidi, “Growth and Development of Formal Art Education in Nigeria, 1900−1960,” TransAfrican Journal of History 15 (1986), 103−126, and Ola Oloidi, “Constraints on the Growth and Development of Modern Nigerian Art in the Colonial Period,” Nsukka Journal of the Humanities 5–6 (June–December 1989), 28−51. 28 Janet Stanley and Bernice Kelly, Nigerian Artists: A Who’s Who and Bibliography (London: Hans Zell, 1993). See especially their “Chronology of Nigerian Art, 1920−1992,” 13−22. 29 Simon Ottenberg, New Traditions from Nigeria: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Nkiru Nzegwu, ed., Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art (Binghamton: ISSA, 1999); Olu Oguibe, Uzo Egonu: An African Artist in the West (London: Kala Press, 1995); Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester: Univ. of Rochester Press, 2008); Chika Okeke-Agulu, “The Quest: From Zaria to Nsukka” in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clémentine Deliss (London: Whitechapel, 1995), 38−57. 30 Offoedu-Okeke and Ogbechie, Artists of Nigeria (cf. note 1), 13−14. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 Ibid., 13. 33 Ibid., 17. 34 For analysis of the Nsukka School of Art, see Ottenberg, New Traditions from Nigeria (cf. note 29). 35 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 36 T. J. Clark, “In a Pomegranate Chandelier” (review of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities), London Review of Books 28/18 (21 September 2006), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/tjclark/in-a-pomegranate-chandelier (accessed 22 January 2015). 37 For detailed review of antecedent publications on South African modern art, see Lize van Robbroeck, “Unsettling the Canon: Some Thoughts on the Design of Visual Century: South African Art in Context,” Third Text Africa 3/1 (November 2013), 27−37. 38 Esme Berman, Art & Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Biographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters, Sculptors and Graphic Artists since 1875 (Cape Town: Balkema, 1983). See also the companion book by Esme Berman, Painting in South Africa (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1993). 39 Janet Stanley, Modern African Art: A Basic Reading List, http://www.sil.si.edu/SILPublications/ ModernAfricanArt/maadetail.cfm?subCategory=South%20Africa (accessed 25 January 2015). 40 Elizabeth Rankin, Images of Metal: Post War Sculptures and Assemblages in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits Univ. Press, 1994); Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal, Art in South Africa: the Future Present (Cape Town: David Philips, 1996); Tai Collard, ed., Collector’s Guide to Art and Artists in South Africa: The Visual Journey into the Thoughts, Emotions, and Minds of 558 Artists (Claremont, South Africa: Twenty Two Press, South African Institute of Artists and Designers, 1998); Sophie Perryer, ed., 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa (Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publications in association with Struik Publishers, 2004); Michael Godby, Is There Still Life? Con-

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tinuity and Change in South African Still Life Paintings (Cape Town: Old Town House, 2007); and Sue Williamson, South African Art Now (New York: Collins Design, 2009). Antoinette du Plessis, “Two More or Less Glossy Books: Problems in Art Documentation of the Eighties,” South African Journal of Art and Architectural History 2/3−4 (1991), 102−107, here 105. Hans Fransen, Three Centuries of South African Art: Fine Art, Architecture, Applied Arts (Johannesburg: Donker, 1982). Steven Sack, Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art, 1930−1988 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1988). E. J. De Jager, Contemporary African Art in South Africa (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1973) and E. J. De Jager, Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists (Alice, Republic of Ciskei: Fort Hare Univ. Press in association with the Fort Hare Foundation, 1992). Elza Miles, Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists (Johannesburg: Human & Rousseau, 1997), and Hayden Proud, ed., ReVisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art (Pretoria: SAHO & UNISA Press, 2005). I am grateful to Mario Pissarra for providing me with a list and overviews of important books on South African art. John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (cf. note 11). Mario Pissarra, “Cast in Colour: Towards and Inclusive South African Art,” Revisions (2014), http://www.revisions.co.za/articles/cast-in-colour-towards-an-inclusive-south-african-art/#. VM1Ao2SUemE (accessed 30 January 2015). Frank Herreman and Mark D’Amato, eds., Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa (New York: The Museum for African Art; Munich: Prestel, 1999). Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin, Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2003). See also Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin, Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1997), a broadly inclusive survey of fine art printmaking. Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (cf. note 11), 133. Marion Arnold, Women and Art in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip and London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), and Marion Arnold and Brenda Schahmann, Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910−1994 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2005). ASAI (http://asai.co.za/) is a research organization focused on African artists who live and work in Africa. See Visual Century, Podcast 1.mp4 (uploaded 14 September 2011), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=L1xtSIf669g (accessed 2 December 2013). “Nelson Mandela at the opening of the Center for Memory September 2004,” quoted in Visual Century, Podcast 1.mp4 (uploaded 14 September 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= L1xtSIf669g (accessed 2 December 2013). “Timelines 1907–1948” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 1, 196–210, here 197. Jillian Carman, “Introduction: Other Ways of Seeing” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 1, 2–19, here 5. Gavin Jantjes, “Preface” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 1, vii−ix, here vii. Repeated in all volumes and various pages. Ibid. Carman, “Introduction” (cf. note 56), here 3−7. Ibid., 3. Salah M. Hassan, “African Modernism: Beyond Alternative Modernities Discourse,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109/3 (Summer 2010), 451−473, here 452. Rasheed Araeen, “Foreword: Art and Human Struggle” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 3, xi− xii, here xi. Carman, “Introduction” (cf. note 56), 7. Lize van Robbroeck, “‘That Magnificent Generation:’ Tradition and Modernity in the Lives, Art and Politics of the First Modern Black Painters” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 1, 114−133. Melanie Hillebrand, “White Artists in Context” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 1, 134−155. Ibid., 154. Paraphrased from van Robbroeck, “Unsettling the Canon” (cf. note 37), 34. Christine Eyene, “Yearning for Art: Exile, Aesthetics and Cultural Legacy” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 2, 96−119, here 97.

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69 Van Robbroeck, “Unsettling the Canon” (cf. note 37), 35. 70 Mario Pissarra, “Introduction: Recovering Critical Moments” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 3, 2−15, here 3. 71 Ibid., 3−5. 72 Gavin Jantjes quoted in Emile Maurice, “Sharp End of the Stick: Images of Conflict and Confrontation” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 3, 82−103, here 87. 73 Sarat Maharaj, “Foreword” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 4, x−xii, here x. 74 Mandisi Majavu and Mario Pissarra, “Introduction: Charting Pathways in an Era of Posts” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 4, 2−19, here 15. 75 See Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “More on Nationalism and Nigerian Art,” African Arts 42/3 (Autumn 2009), 9. 76 Notable among these are Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Nkiru Nzegwu, Dele Jegede, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Aderonke Adesanya, and Smooth UgochukwuNzewi. 77 Van Robbroeck, “Unsettling the Canon” (cf. note 37), 36. 78 The comparison of modern African art to a river and its tributaries first gained popular usage in Jean Kennedy, New Currents Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Art in a Generation of Change (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). 79 Estate of Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994). 80 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (cf. note 8), 1. 81 Bhabha, Nation and Narration (cf. note 2), 3. 82 Ibid., 7. 83 Andries Oliphant, “Imagined Futures: Some New Trends in South African Art” in Visual Century (cf. note 1), vol. 4, 176−193, here 189. 84 Van Robbroeck, “Introduction” (cf. note 14), 7. 85 Salah M. Hassan, Creative Impulses/Modern Expressions: Four African Artists (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. ASRC, 1993), 1. 86 Jan Vansina, Art History in Africa: An Introduction to Method (London: Longman, 1984), 3. 87 Meier, “Authenticity and its Modernist Discontents” (cf. note 23), 36.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Onyema Offoedu-Okeke, Artists of Nigeria, ed. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (Milan: 5 Continents, 2012). Fig. 2: Lize van Robbroeck, ed., Visual Century: South African Art in Context, vol. 2 (Johannesburg: Univ. of the Witwatersrand, 2011).

MATTHEW RAMPLEY

Evolution, Aesthetics, and World Art Introduction It is now a truism that art historians are heirs to an intellectual tradition that privileged the art of Europe and marginalized or entirely bypassed much of the rest of the world. Art history’s exclusions, as well as the baleful influence of European colonialism on art, have long been commented on.1 A central preoccupation has consequently been how to challenge this legacy, how to reorder the map of art history, how to “provincialize” Europe, as one commentator has put it.2 One familiar response, post-colonial criticism, has been to interrogate the mechanisms of exclusion and their relation to the position of cultures under European colonial rule. This involves analysis of the intermeshing of discursive constructs, aesthetic value, and the distribution of colonial power that led to such acts of exclusion in the first place. A second has been to tacitly accept such exclusions in light of the claim that the category “art” is, in any case, a Eurocentric construct, and that even where non-western art is included in the art historical canon, this is at the cost of forcing it into an alien conceptual framework.3 Anthropologists of art have long been concerned with this issue. Many have consequently agreed with Raymond Firth’s assertion that in many small-scale societies, “there are undoubtedly people with aesthetic sensibilities of considerable power, but a concept of art there is hard to disentangle from notions of technical skill on the one hand, and mystical knowledge and control on the other.”4 Accordingly, provincializing Europe on the map of art history entails not only a geographical revision but a deeper rethinking of its fundamental object: the domain of art. What is at stake, therefore, is not simply how the artistic canon might be revised to overcome its Eurocentric myopia, but also the legitimacy of its basic terms of reference. This essay is concerned with an alternative response to this problematic question, which has been to reassert the value of art and aesthetics as global terms of analysis in the name of “world art studies.” As with so many approaches and methods, it is not possible to pinpoint its exact origin, but the concept of world art began to gain currency in the late 1990s, initially centred on the work of John Onians and others at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and it has slowly expanded as a field, including the launch in 2011 of a dedicated journal, World Art.5 It would be difficult to identify the field as guided by a single unitary approach, for its exponents have devised a number of different methods. Nevertheless, a common thread is the idea that for all the diversity of global artistic practices, they are not so incommensurable as to invalidate talk of art and aesthetics as universal phenomena. Hence, advocates of cross-cultural aesthetics, for example, point out that there are recognizable art cultures worldwide that exhibit key shared features with those of Europe.6 These include not only the art cultures of the old world where there was a “privileg-

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ing of aesthetic sensibility relatively purified of non-aesthetic interests into which individuals are taught and trained as a cultural practice,” but also smaller-scale cultures.7 As H. Gene Blocker has argued, cultural differences may be one of degree rather than one of fundamental heterogeneity, and consequently many classic studies now exist of the art discourses of specific cultures.8 Implicit in this approach is what the philosopher Donald Davidson has termed the “principle of charity,” which states that differences only become negotiable and meaningful against an assumed common ground.9 The fact that in many cultures judgements about artworks may be indiscernible from other judgements (e.g. religion, morality, sexuality) does not rule out the legitimacy of talk about aesthetic experience. It merely supports the conclusion that in many different cultures they are framed in greatly varying terms. Indeed, even Firth acknowledged that “pleasure in deft arrangements of formal qualities is not absent.”10 It is merely that this is expressed in terms that are not immediately recognizable as aesthetic judgement. It may be that, to paraphrase Davidson, different cultures are merely words rather than worlds apart.11 One of the most prominent recent interventions into this debate has relied not on cross-cultural comparative studies but on evolutionary theory. According to this argument, what makes it legitimate to discuss art on a cross-cultural basis, indeed to undertake a programme of world art studies, is the fact that art making and aesthetic sensibility are inherited evolved features of the human organism. Arguing that art and the capacity for aesthetic pleasure are biologically rooted features of human experience, it turns to Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution, and the biological sciences to provide a unitary frame of analysis. Before examining the details of such neo-Darwinian theorizing and the different aspects of the debate it addresses, however, it is useful first to explore salient features of Darwin’s thought.

Darwin and the Origins of Beauty The two most important ideas of Darwin are those of natural and sexual selection. In On the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin introduced the idea of natural selection by adaptation.12 Although well known, an outline description of its basic tenets is still helpful. These amount to the proposition that evolution comprises the dual processes of variation and selection. On the one hand biological reproduction involves random variations. Darwin described variation in terms of the divergent behavioural traits or morphological features of the individual organisms in question, but contemporary biologists conceive it in terms of the mutations or “errors” that can occur in replication of DNA during reproduction. It is now accepted that variation occurs at the genetic level and that visible differences in organisms and their behaviour of the kind that Darwin focused on are what one would term the phenotypic expressions of underlying genetic variations. Such variations may have no impact on a particular organism or lead to insignificant changes but, equally, they may be of considerable significance, either interfering with the organism or bestowing on it an advantage in its capacity to survive to

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maturity and reproduce. Indeed, the cumulative effects of successive generational mutations may be such as to lead to the emergence of new species, but this process also underpins natural diversity, in that new species may exist alongside the descendants of organisms that have preserved older traits unchanged, or alongside other variant descendants of the parent species. The new species may, of course, displace the older one out of which it has evolved through its greater success at exploiting the resources available. It has therefore been selected through its better ability to adapt to the pressures of the external environment. The latter is itself subject to change, other species evolve, and natural selection ruthlessly separates out those species able to adapt to changed circumstances from those that cannot. Darwin’s idea has since been associated with the crude formulation of the “survival of the fittest,” an expression originally coined by the social theorist Herbert Spencer, but already in On the Origin of Species he recognized that this could not completely account for the observed diversity of life.13 Many animals had traits that seemed to bestow no obvious advantages, and could not be seen as making the organism better “adapted.” Consequently, he advanced sexual selection as a second mechanism of evolutionary development, by analogy with the effects of breeding: “… if a man can in a short time give elegant carriage and beauty to his bantams, according to his standard of beauty, I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melodious or beautiful males, according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect.”14 Later, in The Descent of Man, he made this a central theme of human and animal evolution.15 At its heart lay the claim that many acquired traits had no adaptational value at all, and had been selected merely because they were able “to excite or charm those of the opposite sex, generally the females, which no longer remain passive, but select the more agreeable partners.”16 The hypertrophic antlers of the red deer, the splendours of the peacock’s tail, or the elaborate structure of the male bowerbird’s bower, for example, have been selected by successive generations of female mates such that they had become permanent traits of the males. In humans, too, Darwin suggested that racial differences are due to sexual selection, where, in different regions of the world, preferences for different skin types or facial physiognomies, for example, have eventually become inherited traits. Even in Darwin’s lifetime there were criticisms of the inbuilt gender biases of this model, for it was based on an ideal typical construction of the male of the species seeking to attract a female mate, and Darwin focused on the importance of display in males.17 Yet as Elizabeth Grosz has argued, not only did Darwin also attend to cases where female display was the decisive factor, in addition, his account challenged existing social mores in suggesting that it was female choice that drove sexual selection.18 Male contemporaries were disturbed by the implications of Darwin’s vision, and it was partly for that reason that his one-time collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace dismissed sexual selection and attempted instead to make natural selection the fundamental driver of evolution.19 For the present discussion the most significant issue is the fact that Darwin introduced aesthetic considerations into the theory of evolution; the appeal of indi-

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viduals to a prospective mate was, he suggested, a question of taste, for visual display played an important role in the process of selection and reproduction.20 This was evident not only in the signalling of sexual difference through visual features, but also in the way that ornamental forms and patterned markings evolved particularly striking forms that had nothing to do with mere brute survival or protection against potential predators. This explanation could be marshalled to explain aspects of human biology, too; the general lack of human bodily hair and other differences between men and women were, he argued, a consequence of sexual selection, and not some naturally selected adaptation. Wallace’s objections were highly influential, however, because many subsequent commentators have argued that such judgements are still, ultimately, about survival. The beauty of the peacock’s tail or of the bowerbird’s bower have consequently often been referred to as “costly signals.” Hence, the fact that the bowerbird spends a disproportionate amount of time on its bower, or that the stag’s antlers can often reach completely impractical dimensions, indicates an ability to secure resources that goes beyond the mere capacity to survive. These offer a visible sign of the organism’s overall health — it has the spare energy and time to devote to these “useless” activities — and hence of the “fitness” of its genes. In this vein Wolfgang Welsch, for instance, has recently argued forcefully that “beauty is a signal for fitness. The female is (for the benefit of her offspring) interested in the reproductive fitness (‘good genes’) of the male; she takes male beauty as a signal for this; that is why male beauty stimulates interest and pleasure on the female side and why the females select the beautiful males, They are guided by beauty’s property as a fitness indicator.”21 These, then, are the bases of a Darwinian aesthetic theory that states that art and the capacity for aesthetic judgement can be traced back either to the process of sexual selection (an alertness to visual display as a source of appeal in its own right) or to natural selection (an alertness to visual appearance as a signal of the organism’s “adaptedness” to and ability to meet the challenges of the environment). Darwin did not himself develop a fully worked up aesthetic theory, but he did speculate on the origins of the sense of beauty. He suggested that it was not limited to humans but could be seen as an evolutionary inheritance from earlier animal origins. “When we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colours before the female … it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner.”22 Indeed, he went further still, suggesting that “man and many of the lower animals are alike pleased by the same colours, graceful shading and forms, and the same sounds.”23 Darwin was especially interested in birdsong. This is often so intricate, he argued, that it could not possibly be seen in solely adaptational terms. Others have since concurred; many birds seem to elaborate their singing as to suggest a pleasure in the activity for its own sake.24 Subsequent research has also suggested that even though birdsong is primarily a tool of sexual selection, female birds do not impulsively respond to the songs of males, but actively sample the songs of a significant number of birds before choosing a mate.25 Birds thus exhibit a form of quasi-aesthetic comparative judgement.

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Yet while Darwin opened up a space for speculation on the evolutionary origins of aesthetic sensibility, he also inserted important caveats. For the great majority of animals “the taste for the beautiful is confined, as far as we can judge, to the attractions of the opposite sex … no animal would be capable of admiring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful landscape or refined music … such tastes are acquired through culture.”26 At a certain point, therefore, the human sense of beauty became attached to objects unrelated to either natural or sexual selection. In other words, culturally shaped preferences appeared to have overridden the relation between sexual selection and aesthetic taste. As Anthony O’Hear has argued, “We hear no stories of animals reflectively, disinterestedly, admiring some aesthetic feature of their environment.”27 Moreover, most research on birdsong has reaffirmed its functional basis in sexual selection; numerous studies have indicated that the more complex and extended its song, the more likely a bird is to attract a mate. The crucial point is that since birdsong demands significant amounts of energy, the ability of a male bird to perform complex songs signifies fitness and access to an extensive territory with plentiful resources.

The Return of Evolutionary Aesthetics Darwin was not the first to suggest that music had origins in the deep past of human existence. An early foray into this possibility was advanced by Herbert Spencer, whose essay “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857) suggested that music might have arisen out of primal emotional expression and that it had subsequently assisted human emotional and intellectual development.28 By the late 1800s the theory of evolution had become a central guiding concept in the humanities. A well-known exponent was Aby Warburg, whose concern with expression, gesture, and representations of the body in Renaissance art was heavily informed by Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Man.29 For Warburg, art was a vehicle of memory, in which primitive inherited emotions could remain latent in the images of the past, and in which certain symbolic images were psychically charged mediators between the present and atavistic animalistic urges from prehistory.30 Warburg was not alone in this approach. The ethnologist Ernst Grosse (1862–1927), for example, who wrote extensively on the art of “primitive” cultures, expounded a theory of the origins of art that was heavily shaped by Darwin. He concurred with Darwin’s observations that “musical tones and rhythm were employed by our semi human ancestors during the mating season, during which all animals were excited by the highest passions.”31 Such engagement with evolutionary theory waned in the mid-twentieth century. Interest in seeking out areas of congruence with the natural sciences diminished and in addition, due to its association with social Darwinism and, in extremis, the cultural politics of Nazi Germany, the theory of evolution became devalued as an approach in the humanities. Its return in recent years in discussions of art is thus as unexpected as it is striking. An important precursor was the publication in 1975 of Sociobiology

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by Edward Wilson.32 A biologist by training, Wilson sought to draw parallels between animal and human behaviour; the similarities between them are more than accidental, he argued, since they indicate the biological roots of human social action and confirm the thesis of humans as the social animal. Wilson made only passing reference to art, but his comments suggested how a sociobiological approach to art might proceed. Like Darwin, he paid particular attention to birdsong. Hence, he noted, “Human beings consider the elaborate courtship and territorial songs of birds to be beautiful and probably ultimately for the same reason they are of use to the birds. With clarity and precision they identify the species, the physiological condition and the mental set of the singer. Richness of information and precise transmission of mood are no less the standards of excellence in human music.”33 Wilson also compared the carnival activities of chimpanzees, such as whooping and drumming, with human singing and dancing. Both reinforce group identity, he argued, and this is because song and dance originated in these activities of our primate ancestors. Sociobiology has become an established, although much contested field, and has opened up the possibilities of Darwinian analysis in a wide range of social and cultural practices.34 An additional conceptual impulse to the emergence of evolutionary theories of art was provided by the publication in 1982 of Richard Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype.35 Dawkins first came to prominence with The Selfish Gene, which put forward the now standard argument that natural selection operates at the level of genes and that individual organisms are the phenotypic expressions of genes.36 In The Extended Phenotype Dawkins argued that not only organisms should be regarded as phenotypes, but also the organisms’ wider impact on the environment, ranging from interaction with other organisms (such as parasites) to much cited examples of environmental change caused by animals such as the beaver’s dam or ants’ nests. This account prepared the way for viewing human cultural practices as phenotypic expressions of genes. Dawkins and Wilson were followed in the 1990s by the emergence of evolutionary psychology. The field is broad, but a basic recurring thesis is that the human mind is as much an evolved outcome of natural selection as the human body.37 In other words, all the features of human psychology are successful adaptations to the environmental challenges faced by our ancestors, during which time other, variant, forms of behaviour, psychological dispositions, and cognitive abilities were not ultimately retained, since they were non-adaptive, and may even have been maladapted, destructive tendencies. A recurrent trope in evolutionary psychology is that of the mind as a multi-functional modular structure — the metaphor of the Swiss army knife has been advanced — in which a variety of different cognitive skills, such as the ability to use language, to recognize faces, the sense of number, and the ability to detect cheats, arose independently as adaptive responses to discrete evolutionary pressures.38 The idea was informed by the discovery in neuroscience that mental functions can be localized in the brain, as well as by the fact that the analogy with biological evolutionary theory requires the identification of basic units of replication comparable in function to genes. Indeed, evolutionary theorists of language have taken a further step in identifying the particular evolved sub-routines

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and sub-modules of the brain involved in speaking.39 Evolutionary psychology has provided a powerful source of Darwinian ideas about art; numerous authors have argued that certain features of art and literature are the expression of certain evolved features of human psychology and cognition, and can only be understood in such a context. As Mark Pagel, a prominent representative of this thinking, has argued, humans are “wired for culture.”40 In other words, cultural practices (including art) are the phenotypic expressions of cognitive abilities that are the product of evolution and hence are “hard-wired” instinctual mental traits. Evolutionary psychology has also been important for more general debates about the origins of art. The archaeologist Steven Mithen, for example, has argued that the explosion of human creativity over the past 100,000 years associated with the birth of art, is the result of a crucial evolutionary step: the ability to transcend the modular division of the mind and to combine the abilities of different cognitive domains to perform higher level synthetic tasks.41 According to this argument there was a two-step process. First, our proto-human ancestors evolved mental modules in response to environmental pressures that gave them a range of specialist cognitive skills, followed by the evolution later of the ability to combine them. Since an important dimension of creativity is the ability to draw analogies between otherwise disparate phenomena, it was this ability of early humans to combine different cognitive capacities that made art possible.42 A second claim advanced by evolutionary psychologists is that while human cognition is the result of adaptations to environmental pressures during the long prehistory of the human species, it has ceased to evolve in any significant way during recorded history. In other words, modern humans have a mind that evolved in response to an entirely different set of circumstances: the Pleistocene environment where humans became biologically distinct from other primate species.43 Hence, modern cultures and societies are a kind of veneer laid over much older mental instincts. As one interpretation has suggested, reading nineteenth-century British novels is an exercise in engaging with Palaeolithic politics, since intersubjective relations depicted in Victorian fiction are rooted in deeper evolved patterns of social interaction.44

Subjects of Debate Attempts to analyse a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, from delinquency to sexual difference, parental love, and homicide as the causal effects of the mind’s evolution — its “architecture” as evolutionary psychologists often term it — have proliferated.45 They have also met with fierce criticism. Yet rather than engage in these wider methodological polemics, this paper only discusses them inasmuch as they impinge directly on and inform neo-Darwinian theories of art. Consideration of some specific cases brings out the nature of the debate. In 1993 the Russian émigré painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid conducted a now famous poll of the American public titled America’s Most Wanted. In

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an effort to gauge popular taste, the poll asked subjects to indicate their preferred artistic subject matter.46 The resulting composite image bore a close resemblance to the typical mid-nineteenth-century landscape paintings of Hudson River School artists such as Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole, involving a pleasing pastoral scene set by a lake and populated by typical North American flora and fauna in the foreground, and agreeably rolling hills in the background. To add a touch of mischief, Komar and Melamid added George Washington, as well as a hippopotamus wallowing in the shallows. Subsequently, the two artists undertook a similar exercise with a range of other states and cultures, including Kenya, Russia, France, China, Iceland, and Portugal.47 There was a striking commonality across these diverse cultures in the preferred landscape type. If we take this parodic exercise seriously, two alternative readings are possible. One, put forward by Arthur Danto, is that it reveals that the global saturation of images has produced a common kitsch aesthetic.48 Danto referred to the way the painting recalls the landscape imagery of popular calendars, and he concluded that it would therefore be no surprise that the idealized landscape should be remarkably consistent from one culture to another, since the international traffic in images has eroded older cultural specificities. An alternative interpretation was offered by the philosopher Dennis Dutton, who argued that the cross-cultural similarities in preference betrayed a shared ancestral psychological heritage. As Dutton noted, “Human responses to landscapes also show atavisms, and the Komar and Melamid experiments are a fascinating, if inadvertent, demonstration of this … This fundamental attraction to certain types of landscapes is not socially constructed but is present in human nature as an inheritance from the Pleistocene, the 1.6 million years during which modern humans evolved.”49 For Dutton the landscape corresponds to the East African savannah where humans evolved and includes a number of features, such as varied wildlife (hence a bountiful source of food) and places for refuge from potential predators, that stimulate atavistic desires for security that are engraved deeply in the human evolutionary inheritance from the distant past.50 In other words, America’s Most Wanted is a representation of the ideal habitat of our prehistoric ancestors. The fact that subsequently a wide array of alternative landscape ideals have been depicted in art — from alpine scenery to the sublimity of the desert or the polar regions — does not contradict this, Dutton argued, for Komar and Melamid’s survey demonstrated that despite such layers of historical acculturation a deeper instinctual preference will always resurface, in the right circumstances. This argument was based on commonplace tenets of evolutionary psychology. The taste for a certain kind of landscape expressed specific preferences that had evolved in response to early formative stages in human development. The implication was that the subsequent history of humanity, which had learned to adapt to a wide variety of environments, from equatorial jungle to Arctic tundra, presented merely epiphenomenal episodes that had no impact on deeper human aesthetic dispositions since the Pleistocene. Dutton’s account was also informed by the work of the geographer Jay Appleton, who described what he argued was an innate bio-

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logically inherited response to landscape.51 Appleton’s theory has proven influential on many thinkers in addition to Dutton. The architectural historian Grant Hildebrand, for example, has tried to examine responses to the built environment in a similar vein.52 The aesthetic response to architecture, he argues, is shaped by evolved innate preferences formed when humans were hunters and foragers; architectural forms attuned to such preferences are thus seen as “beautiful.” As Hildebrand states, some architectural scenes evoke “an archetypal image whose physical manifestations would have conferred a survival advantage … In this way an innate liking for such scenes would have persisted, even intensified, with the procession of generations over time …”53 Examples include the desire for “refuge and prospect,” (i.e. protection from the elements and other predators) combined with the maintenance of a vantage point over prospective prey; the desire for “enticement,” which answers to natural human curiosity and the pleasure gained from new experiences; and the preference for “order and complexity,” in other words, the pleasure gained from ordering a complex visual environment into “survival-useful” categories. For evolutionary aesthetics, therefore, the origins of taste lie in adapted preferential responses to environments that are conducive to survival. However, just as Darwin speculated that the origins of aesthetic sensibility lay in animal sexuality, so too have neo-Darwinian authors advanced similar notions. One example is Dutton’s claim that the sense of beauty originated in a desire for forms and ratios that functioned as “fitness indicators.”54 There is a cross-cultural male attraction to women with a specific hip to waist ratio (from 0.7 to 0.8), he argued, and he attributed this to the fact that it was an indicator of childbearing capacity (in contrast to a ratio of 0.9, which is more typical of prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women). This supposedly overrides culturally relative preferences for larger or thinner women, for in all cases it is the ratio that is constant. Likewise, the preference for facial and bodily symmetry is linked to the fact that they are indicators of general health. Judgements about bodily appearance as a sign of the fitness of the other as a potential mate act as a template for all judgements of beauty, and this underlies all aesthetic sensibility. A similar idea has been proposed by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. In The Mating Mind Miller states unequivocally that art and beauty serve as fitness indicators, an idea discussed earlier. This relates not merely to the fact that certain aesthetic features, such as bodily symmetry, may be outward expressions of genetic health, but also to the function of art as a costly activity.55 As Miller has noted, “We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye co-ordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills and lots of free time. Also, like bowerbirds, Pleistocene artists must have been physically strong enough to defend their rival creations against theft and vandalism by sexual rivals.”56 For other commentators the focus of interest has been the role of art as a product as well as agent of sexual selection. Analysing female puberty rites among the Nuba, the Fang of West Africa, and the Bemba of Zambia, Camilla Power has argued that

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the use of pigment in bodily decoration was a way of attracting prospective mates. It is a practice with ancient origins, she claims, and its use followed the disappearance of other visual signals that a woman was ovulating. Adorning the body in red pigment was thus a kind of “sham menstrual advertising.”57 According to this argument the development of increasingly complex designs was a kind of evolutionary arms race, in which women competed with each other to attract the fittest mate. The subsequent adoption by men of body adornment she characterizes as the co-opting of a strategy in order to enhance their own attractiveness. The idea of art and beauty as tools in the service of sexual competitiveness has been extended beyond broad theoretical questions to the interpretation of individual artefacts. One much discussed example is the analysis of Palaeolithic hand axes by Steven Mithen and Marek Kohn, who have speculated that they were instruments of sexual selection.58 Struck in particular by the prevalence of large hand axes that seemed too unwieldy to use, they suggested that such artefacts were forms of conspicuous display comparable to the peacock’s tail. Hence, “the manufacture of a fine symmetrical hand axe (might) have been a reliable indicator of the hominid’s ability to secure food, find shelter, escape from predation, and compete successfully within the social group. Such hominids would have been attractive mates, their abilities indicating ‘good genes.’”59 Not all evolutionary accounts have derived the aesthetic sense so directly from sexual impulses, however. Mark Pagel referred to art as a “cultural enhancer,” in other words, “something that exists solely to promote the interests of a replicator …”60; as such, it is much more inscribed in the process of natural selection. Culture is a “survival vehicle,” he has contended, which acts as a kind of supplement to the human body and enables genes to reproduce. It does so through its capacity to elicit or motivate emotions, strengthen beliefs, transmit information, or increase the cohesion of a particular group. All of these aid the survival of the individual or group and, therefore, enable genetic transmission from one generation to the next. Pagel is less interested in how certain forms of visual display serve as visual analogues of reproductive “fitness” and more in how art functions as a vehicle of natural selection by enhancing individual and group survivability. Hence, he too has suggested, not only that humans have evolved to respond to art, but also that “art” has learnt to manipulate that evolved response mechanism in order to ensure its reproduction. In this sense “art” acts like the selfish gene of Dawkins, using humans and their art-making behaviours as phenotypic vehicles. This account relies on a highly questionable ascription of agency to art, of course, but it is also vulnerable to the obvious criticism that for every example of art that increases group cohesion, it is possible to cite counter-instances of art that achieve precisely the opposite. As noted earlier, Darwin drew parallels between human music and birdsong. The mere existence of the latter attested, he argued, to the primitive and distant origins of music, and recent authors have made similar claims.61 In addition to positing the biological origins of music, Steven Mithen has proposed the existence of a protolanguage “Hmmmmm,” in which music and language were not yet distinguished.62 Mithen has also argued that the sense of rhythm, essential to the

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emergence of music, was linked to the development of bipedalism, which required a very specific set of motor skills, including rhythmic co-ordination of the body, in order to maintain balance. Consequently, “as our ancestors evolved into bipedal humans so, too, would their inherent musical abilities evolve — they got rhythm. One can easily imagine an evolutionary snowball occurring as the selection of cognitive mechanisms for time-keeping improved bipedalism, which led to the ability to engage in further physical activities that in turn required time-keeping for their efficient execution.”63 Evolutionary theory has also served as the basis for a programme of interpretative analysis. Under the banner of “cognitive cultural criticism,” a number of authors have attempted to view individual works through the lens of evolutionary psychology. One of its leading representatives, Lisa Zunshine, has argued strongly for the need to ground interpretation in the analysis of how texts and images mobilize or challenge universal human psychological traits acquired as part of the human evolutionary heritage.64 This approach has become prominent in literary studies, where there have been attempts to identify literary “universals” anchored in evolved predispositions of the human mind, but also it has parallels in visual criticism.65 Ellen Spolsky coined the notion of “iconotropism” to refer to what she argued is an innate and evolved cognitive “hunger” for visual imagery, asserting that it fulfils a particular psychological need — rooted in evolutionary development — that other forms of representation cannot satisfy.66 For Spolsky this is illustrated in works such as Raphael’s Transfiguration (1516–20) in that it answers the problem of cognitive dissonance or “gappiness,” in other words, the alleged inability of the brain’s mental modules to co-ordinate their separate activities to produce a unified perception of certain concepts and ideas. The Transfiguration story prompts just such “gappiness” through its depiction of the co-presence of the divine and the mortal. While Raphael’s painting does not entirely resolve these contradictions, it nevertheless manages to “re-present a situation that was counterintuitive — that a man could simultaneously appear as a god — in a way that made it possible for the specific community in which he worked to understand and accept.”67

Critical Problems The basic tenet of evolutionary aesthetics is thus that the capacity for making art and aesthetic sensibility are transcultural phenomena founded in evolved human biological and psychological dispositions. These innate features arose because they were “adapted” behaviours; in other words, they bestowed some form of competitive advantage on those human ancestors who developed them. Frederick Turner, another enthusiastic advocate, has stated unequivocally that the sense of beauty is a natural intuition or “capacity of the nervous system,” and that “beauty is in some way a biological adaptation and a physiological reality: the experience of beauty can be connected to the activity of actual neurotransmitters in the brain, endorphins and enkephalins.”68

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Evolutionary aesthetics is one of the more contemporary incarnations of the debate concerning the universality of art. Dutton, for example, did not use the terminology of “world art,” but he sharply criticized others for stressing the incommensurability of different cultural and artistic practices or for contesting the pertinence of the term “art.” The contention that the idea of aesthetic experience is an Enlightenment construct amounts to little more, he argued, than the claim that the Kantian tradition of aesthetic thought was an ideological programme that failed to do justice even to the varieties of artistic pleasure in eighteenth-century Prussia. Critics of the Kantian aesthetic tradition offer no decisive argument against the universality of art, merely a criticism of the universality of a particular concept of art. Conversely, there are many examples of art discourses and practices that are not so distant from that formulated in Europe. They range from ancient Egypt, where art developed as a semi-autonomous practice with distinct codes and traditions, to pre-modern China, where there was an advanced discourse of connoisseurship with a flourishing market in copies and forgeries of master paintings, and even, as Peter Burke has suggested, to sixteenth-century Japan.69 Moreover, for Dutton, defenders of the thesis of cross-cultural incommensurability are guilty of an intellectual sleight of hand, comparing ritual and craft artefacts of small-scale non-Western cultures with high art products of the European tradition. A more meaningful comparison would be with quilts and other examples of European and American folk art, where aesthetic form is also intimately bound up with use and other values. Such observations give cause for reflection, but even so, neo-Darwinian aesthetics still exhibits profound flaws. First of these is the question as to whether a basic category error has been committed when the pleasure associated with sexual selection is conflated with aesthetic experience. Darwin suggested that the roots of taste might lie in female admiration of the plumage of a prospective male mate, or of the magnificence of its bower, but he was vague about the precise relation between such sensory judgements and human aesthetic taste, other than by asserting that while “animals have a sense of beauty, it must not be supposed that such sense is comparable with that of a cultivated man, with his multiplex and complex associated ideas.”70 The concept of animal aesthetics and its relation to human taste is thus not critically examined and rests on a simplified concept of the aesthetic as sensory pleasure. It ignores, for example, the distinction between beauty and the merely agreeable; the equation of animal visual (and other) sensory response with human aesthetic sense is merely assumed rather than argued for.71 Stephen Davies has suggested that it may be better to regard the preferences expressed by animals as proto-aesthetic in character, but this creates further problems, since the nature of such “proto-aesthetic” preferences would need to be analysed, and it would be necessary to provide an account of how, when, and why they developed into identifiably “aesthetic” ones.72 More generally, therefore, the very argument on which Kant based his identification of aesthetic judgement — namely, its difference from the merely agreeable — has been ignored or bypassed, rather than seriously analysed.

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The notion of an animal aesthetic has often rested on striking examples, such as the peacock or the bowerbird, but visual signals to attract a mate are important for a wide range of animals, from crustaceans to insects, and few have been inclined to see these as endowed with a comparable sensibility. Indeed, while humans may find the male bowerbird’s bower aesthetically appealing, there is no evidence that the female regards it in those terms; it may just be a programmed response to a visual stimulus, and it also needs to be considered whether other non-visual senses may have a role. Even if one is sympathetic to the neo-Darwinian position, there is still a question about its explanatory power, for while it offers a quasi-positivistic claim that there was a process of selection (sexual or otherwise) and that there were certain pre-aesthetic conditions and skills that may have been selected, it fails to amplify the issue further. What remains to be determined is why art-like behaviour takes the specific forms it does in particular cultures. In other words, an argument formulated to defend the notion of the universal quality of art can only do so at the cost of being unable to analyse the diversity of forms it takes in human cultures. It has no theoretical capacity to account for specific aesthetic preferences. This argument extends to the question of aesthetic value. As Davies has noted, “even if we are evolved to prefer savannah and similar landscapes, this tells us nothing about why anyone would prefer a painting by Constable to an unimaginative calendar photograph of parkland.”73 One of the most powerful arguments revealing the limitations of evolutionary aesthetics and, in particular, the idea of its adaptive function is provided, ironically, by Richard Dawkins. In The Extended Phenotype Dawkins argued that while it is on the level of genetic mutation that evolution takes place and not on the level of the individual or the group, one has to avoid seeing certain physiological traits or adaptive behaviours as directly causally related to certain genetic origins. This caution is needed, he claimed, due to the complexity of the relation between the gene, its phenotypic expression, and the external environment.74 There is often a built-in time lag, which means that a behaviour or trait may be an adaptation evolved in response to an environment that no longer exists. The easiest illustration of this can be found in certain animal responses (Dawkins cited the examples of moths flying into candles and hedgehogs rolling up into a ball when facing a car) in which adaptive behaviours are shown to be mismatched to certain environments. A comparable, although slightly more complex example, he argued, is that of human homosexuality. Even if homosexuality is the result of a genetic mutation, and Dawkins recognized that this is a contentious issue, to claim it as linked to a specific gene misses its complexity. For, he noted: It is a fundamental truism, of logic more than of genetics, that the phenotypic “effect” of a gene is a concept that has meaning only if the context of environmental influences is specified, environment being understood to include all the other genes in the genome. A gene “for” A in environment X may well turn out to be a gene for B in environment Y. It is simply meaningless to speak of an absolute, context-free phenotypic effect of a given gene.75

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This has important implications for the idea of the gene “for” homosexuality, Dawkins argues, because “A gene for homosexuality in our modern environment might have been a gene for something utterly different in the Pleistocene … It may be that the phenotype which we are trying to explain did not even exist in some earlier environment, even though the gene did then exist.”76 Of course, the reference to a single gene “for” some phenotypic effect is now dated and it is now held that interacting groups of genes (genomes) rather than individual genes may be related to physiological or behavioural effects. In addition, many would dispute Dawkins’s primarily genetic explanation of what is a complex socio-cultural phenomenon. However, the point here is not to intervene into debates about human sexuality as much as to highlight that even within evolutionary theory the attempt to trace phenotypic effects — art making and the exercise of aesthetic judgement — back to genotypic transformations is fraught with difficulties. Dawkins’s argument implies, in contrast, that the evolved mental capacity now putatively seen as responsible for certain aesthetic preferences may have equally been a capacity for something entirely different, a phenotypic expression of something that no longer exists. Against this, Dutton, Appleton, Hildebrand, and others assume aesthetic predispositions evolved in the Pleistocene era have undergone no subsequent evolution. Dawkins’s observations suggest, however, the need for caution. There is no certainty that the adaptive preference for a certain kind of landscape among our Pleistocene ancestors would now be expressed phenotypically in a preference for an artistic representation of the same kind of landscape. This is doubly the case given that Dutton drew no distinction between a Pleistocene response to a landscape and the response of a twentieth-century viewer to a painting of a similar landscape or, in the case of Hildebrand, to the aesthetic configuration of a spatial environment in a work of architecture.

Adaptations to What? One argument underpinning the claim that aesthetic judgements have their origins in evolved species-wide biological preferences is the contention that there are constants transcending cultural difference. Regarding the putative ideal hip–waist ratio in women, one observer has stated that “the physical features that men find attractive are properties of young adult women in current good health who are primed for successful reproduction. Thus the preferred body mass index of women is twenty to twenty-four kilogrammes per meter of height” and it is rooted, he has argued, in the fact that this ratio serves as a fitness indicator.77 There is plenty of evidence to suggest that this ratio, even if correct, is of rather more recent vintage, and that it perhaps dates back only as far as classical Greece and is specific to Mediterranean and European cultures.78 Pre-classical art, such as the korai of archaic Greece or devotional statuettes of Bronze Age Cyprus, demonstrated rather different norms. As George Hersey has suggested, if figurative representations are to be taken seriously as collective representations of idealized body

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types, there was, as late as the Bronze Age, considerably greater proportional diversity than that associated with the classical Greek canon.79 In any case, far from merely reflecting prehistoric evolved preferences, the visual arts have also been mobilized to shape and reinforce historically variant ideals of bodily proportions. In the absence of other types of evidence, this is a speculative suggestion, but no less so than the claims of evolutionary aesthetics. Indeed, it can be argued that in a Pleistocene environment where predators were common, an equally important indicator of “fitness” and suitability as a mate might have been the ability of a potential mother to flee with her child and escape danger. Here it would have been less the hip–waist ratio that mattered than her overall athleticism; body mass might then have been more of an issue. Alternatively, with the availability of food always contingent upon unpredictable external factors, an athletic body might not be such an advantage since it would have little stored body fat to tide one over a lean period and ensure that infants were provided for.80 In other words, the hip–waist ratio is arbitrarily chosen since many other factors could lay equal claim to priority as determinants of fitness, depending on what one decides it is fitness for. The identification of evolutionary factors is a matter of projection based on the cultural lens of the commentator. This points to a larger problem — namely, that potentially any biological factor can be adduced as evidence of the origins of the aesthetic impulse. Indeed, there are a number of plausible evolutionary and biological explanations as to the origins of art and the aesthetic sense. This echoes a criticism levelled at sociobiology when it was first formulated. As Richard Lewontin argued in the 1970s, such explanations are often “an exercise in plausible story-telling rather than a science of testable hypotheses.”81 It is this that underlies the frequent criticism, formulated by Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, that evolutionary theories frequently offer little more than “just-so stories.”82 This is evident in the numerous different theories of the adaptational function of art and the aesthetic sense. In addition to art’s alleged role as a fitness indicator, it has also been claimed to enable humans to represent non-existent states of affairs as a mode of self-extension, to rehearse strategies for survival, to shape the attention of others, to construct an intelligible model of reality, or to organize motivational systems above and beyond immediate instinctual reactions. In each case, the putative adaptational function is asserted, but there is no means by which such explanations can be critically scrutinized or a judgement made about their relative merits. To cite one critic, there is “no way to adjudicate between [Joseph] Carroll’s belief that literature provides an emotional skein to brute existence and Dutton’s that literature was useful for counterfactual role playing or [Blakey] Vermeule and Dutton’s that literary language was a kind of courtship ornament or [Brian] Boyd’s that stories and other art forms hold our attention and so ‘make the most of the brain’s plasticity.’”83 In other words, the theory of aesthetics as adaptation is conceptually underdetermined; the meaning of the term “adaptation” is hugely variable with much use of speculative suggestions. This is not necessarily a divisive criticism; as Robert Brandon has pointed out, evolutionary theorists frequently have to rely on providing similar kinds of potential

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explanations as to how, for example, insects developed wings, or why fish evolved lateral lines.84 The difference, however, is that such explanations can draw on a wide array of evidence — from aerodynamic experiments and mathematical data to the study of the biology of contemporary fish — that enable one to discount some explanations and accept others as more likely. Evolutionary theories of art and culture in contrast have no such structure of argumentation, and in some cases they are reduced to making even more weakly supported claims. Literary critic Brian Boyd, for example, asserts that “If art … offered on average no advantage in terms of survival and reproduction, many generations of intense evolutionary competition would have eliminated it.”85 In other words, because art exists, it must have had some adaptational function. This exemplifies the empty and circular logic that sustains many evolutionary theories. Its relentlessly reductive vision rules out from the start the possibility of non-adaptive variations. Yet for it to be persuasive it would be necessary to show that the adaptational advantages of a particular artistic practice — and these would first have to be spelled out — were sufficiently extensive to make a difference, i.e., to determine why it and not other, competing variants were retained and reproduced. This is where the thesis is at its weakest, however, for it is difficult to envisage a specific cultural institution making so significant a difference to the survival of the group as would be required by the theory.86 Finally, even if the capacity for art is the consequence of adaptive variations, this does not mean that all artistic practices can subsequently be explained by reference to evolved psychological or other dispositions. Indeed, even supportive commentators recognize that art (and culture in general) has developed into an autonomous sphere that exerts its own selective pressures that are completely separate from those evolutionary forces which, it is claimed, facilitated the emergence of art and aesthetic taste. Darwin, too, recognized the importance of play; birds appear to elaborate their song for no apparent reason other than the sheer pleasure of singing, although, equally, play itself has often been held to have an adaptive function.87 There are a number of ways this uncoupling of art and the aesthetic from their putative biological roots can be considered. One is based on the model of evolution associated with what has been termed “niche construction theory.”88 This takes issue with the assumed opposition between genetic mutation and phenotypic expression. Such an opposition ignores the co-evolution of the two.89 Niche construction theory emphasizes that phenotypes are not simply the expression of a genetic mutation that has proven to provide an advantageous adaptation to external environmental selection pressures; it argues instead that their activity also transforms those environments. While niche construction theory agrees that adaptation to environments is the central engine of natural selection, it stresses that those environments are themselves shaped by the behaviour of organisms. This is obvious in the case of the human transformation of the environment — it is now primarily urban and creates distinctive pressures that did not previously exist — but niche construction theory generalizes this as a thesis about organisms, arguing that no organism is ever in an entirely passive position of “responding” to an environment created externally. Organisms thus to some degree create their own selective envi-

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ronmental pressures.90 It is consequently not so straightforward to draw a distinction between apparently universal biologically rooted traits and those that are socially acquired. The two categories can be conflated, not in the sense that the social can be subsumed within the biological (the preferred position of sociobiology and evolutionary theories of art and culture), but in the sense that the putatively natural environment exerting selection pressures on various cultural practices is itself to some degree culturally constructed. An alternative theory that reaches similar conclusions is Michael Tomasello’s notion of the “ratcheting effect.”91 Language and culture may well be the result of an evolutionary shift in human cognition — specifically, the capacity to understand others as intentional agents — but they enable increasingly complex forms of elaboration of experience that are themselves not biologically given. It is this he calls the ratcheting effect. Thus, the sense of number and the ability to count may be universal evolved cognitive abilities, but higher level mathematical knowledge, such as algebra and calculus, is neither universal across all cultures nor even possessed by all members of advanced industrial societies. Instead, it is acquired through a process of cultural ratcheting, in which cumulative cultural learning and refinement can transform and extend an inherited biologically rooted trait. An analogy can be found in the visual arts, and it is suggested by David Summers’s Real Spaces.92 Founded on a quasi-Heideggerian principle of art as articulation of being-in-the-world, Summers’s work is organized around the thesis that “art records the many ways in which the world at hand has been acknowledged in being shaped by us human beings.”93 Art records and articulates human embodied experience and the shaping of space, which also encompasses the virtual space of the pictorial imagination, social space, and personal space. Underlying all of these is “real space,” defined by the “body’s finite spatiotemporality, its typical structure, capacities and relations,” which transcend cultural difference.94 Summers pays considerable attention to prehistoric European art, which registers, he argues, the emergence of basic spatial concepts. Hence, in the earliest prehistoric art the concept of plane has not been disentangled from that of surface. In the caves of Lascaux, for example, while the animal paintings are in profile and imply a notional planar presentation, their arrangement and elaboration are dictated by the irregular surfaces of the cave on which they are painted. Planarity, in contrast, requires a conception of the surface as uniform at all points. This was absent in Lascaux, but the famous Palaeolithic figurines of women, including the so-called “Venus” of Willendorf, display a concern with axial symmetry that underpins an understanding of planar relations, for symmetry is observable only on the basis of the implied axial address that views the body in a specific manner. By the time of the Mesolithic (10–8,000 BCE) cave paintings of Cueva Remigia in Spain, a more fully developed sense of plane was in operation; the paintings have internal spatiotemporal relations, with relations between objects in the paintings represented by a common measure.95 Summers’s key argument, and the most pertinent one for the current discussion, is that art does not merely record such shifts in the experience of space (both real

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and virtual), but also provides their enabling conditions. It is through the creation and refinement of figurines that concepts of axial symmetry first emerged; before the development of multi-figure paintings in the caves of Spain and south-western France the notion of planarity had no meaning and was thus not possible because it was not imaginable. Summers marshals a similar argument in relation to refinement and its relation to arbitrariness.96 Many Neolithic arrowheads exhibit a refinement of technique that exceeds the exigencies of their use as weapons. A distinction is introduced between such refined objects and their everyday counterparts; thus, they become not merely functional tools but also artefacts with a social purpose. This entails not merely the familiar distinction between the utilitarian and the aesthetic, but also a hierarchy between the elevated and the lowly; such objects have a purpose beyond the ordinarily skilful and may have uses in situations that have higher social status or where their users have higher social rank. Refinement makes social distinctions and hierarchies visible but, crucially, it also takes part in the enactment of relations of status and power and therefore may have enabled their evolution and articulation. Hence, as the encounter with the material world becomes framed by the intersubjective domain of intentional activity, the “world of cultural artefacts becomes imbued with intentional affordances to complement their sensory-motor affordances.”97 Crucially, too, because refinement makes visible the possibility that artefacts can be otherwise, a space is opened up for innovation: “refinement may encourage arbitrary invention and innovation at many levels … in a series of intentionally elaborated artefacts, in which elaboration is meant precisely to distinguish from the usual, innovation might be justified at any point in the series.”98 Summers is describing a process comparable to the ratcheting effect identified by Tomasello; it is only through art making that certain qualities becoming possible or imaginable. To recast this in the language of evolutionary theory, phylogenetically acquired capacities become fundamentally transformed and new skills and forms of cognition are enabled for the first time. Working with symbolic media makes possible new forms of creative innovation.

Concluding Remarks The attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the understanding of art, and to use it as the basis for a global aesthetics, has been too reliant on intuitive assumptions and speculation to provide a convincing conceptual framework for a global vision of art. As Stephen Davies has recently suggested, the embrace of evolutionary theory is driven by a defensive anxiety to prove its social relevance. In this regard it echoes the debates over the “scientific” status of the humanities of a century ago and recalls the interests of art historians in the natural and biological sciences.99 In addition, Davies notes, “we should be sensitive to the political dimensions of the debate and to the tendency to rationalize deeply felt but untested intuitions.”100 The new Darwinism is political in a more specific sense, too, for it has frequently been linked to

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an explicitly conservative programme that bypasses difficult questions of cultural difference in the name of universal transcultural values. Joseph Carroll, one of the leading exponents of Darwinism in literary criticism, has been unremittingly hostile to what he terms the “postmodern paradigm” in cultural theory and to the “obsolete social and psychological doctrines like those of Marx and Freud.”101 Arguing for the adoption of evolutionary aesthetics, he has stated that “despite the massive ideological resistance to the idea of innate characteristics, this kind of advance is virtually inevitable.”102 Dutton adopted a similar position, posing as the outsider to an academic establishment in thrall to a multiculturalism allegedly seeking to deny the sense of common humanity. Frederick Turner, too, has criticized the intellectual tradition, “running from Kant to Mach to Wittgenstein to Derrida” that problematizes meaning and value.103 In its place he attempts to foreground ways that the aesthetic dimension minimizes cultural difference, in order to install an ecopoetics that unearths the “ur-language” of poetry and the visual arts and the universal foundations of music. Such political posturing indicates that the stakes are higher than merely a debate over artistic value and theory. Indeed, it highlights the fact that while evolutionary theories of art seek to embrace art on a global scale, many of its representatives are motivated by profound ideological differences with postcolonial art history and theory. For if the latter has contested dominant Eurocentric narratives of art in the name of subaltern cultures and practices, evolutionary accounts do so in the name of an essentializing and Eurocentric vision of art that seeks to erase cultural difference. There is a particular irony here, of course, given that a central preoccupation for Darwin was the explanation of natural variety. The advocates of neo-Darwinian accounts of art, including many representatives of “world art,” seem, in contrast, to be tone deaf to variation in the cultural sphere. In their eyes, any practice, regardless of the forms it adopts, has the same basic function and explanation. Its meaning is to serve as one more instance of the abstract generalities of the human biological condition. However, even if the origins of art lie in the evolution of one or more biological inherited capacities, the reasons why art emerged out of them, as well as how and when it did so, and why it was ascribed certain powers and took on normative status, are contingent, historical facts, not biological ones; this is the point at which biological and evolutionary explanations have to give way to other kinds of accounts.104 In other words, cultural difference cannot be simply bypassed. It is at this point that the political undercurrents of the neo-Darwinian project become visible once more, for art in such accounts is always seen as framed by its relation to the human species. Yet such reference to the generalities of human beings stumble when confronted with what Hannah Arendt famously referred to as the “human condition of plurality,” with the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world … we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived …”105 To deny that plurality, to highlight instead the common identity of Man, as she put it, is to rob humans of their sociality and reduce them to mere animal being. It is this imperative that is both so puzzling, but also so dangerous, in the neo-Darwinian theory of art.

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If one were to conclude with this observation, it might be tempting to dismiss the entire project of an evolutionary humanities. Yet rather than giving up on the paradigm, one might contend that the work of Summers and Tomasello suggests that a global “natural history” of art might still be possible. Its exponents would need, however, to examine how inherited traits and dispositions were reworked and transformed in particular ways and consider the various cultural configurations in which they have appeared in the historical record, instead of always tracing them back to the same mythic primal scene of Pleistocene origins. The present analysis suggests, however, that most of the current exponents of evolutionary accounts of art display little of the conceptual sophistication and nuance that would be required of such an approach.

Notes 1 See, for example, the writings of Indian art historians such as Rajendralal Mitra, The Antiquities of Orissa (Calcultta: Wyman & Co., 1875); Shyama Charan Srimani, Suksha Shilper Utpatti o Arya Jatir Shilpa Chaturi (Calcutta: Roy Press, 1874). Ananda Coomaraswamy provided a powerful denunciation of British imperialism in Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908). 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). 3 A prominent instance is James Elkins, Stories of Art (London: Routledge, 2002). As Elkins argues “… every history of non-western art and every history of a new subject becomes a version, an adaptation of [Gombrich’s] Story of Art and its competitors … Indian, Chinese and southeast Asian scholars write Western-style essays and books, adopt Western armatures for their arguments, hold exhibitions and colloquia, create departments and curricula, all in the Western manner” (150). 4 Raymond Firth, “Art and Anthropology” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 24. A similar view is put forward by Joanna Overing in Howard Morphy, Joanna Overing, Jeremy Coote and Peter Gow, “Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category” in Key Debates in Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 1996), 260–265. 5 Notable publications include John Onians, ed., Atlas of World Art (London: Laurence King, 2004); Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008). 6 See, for example, Richard Anderson, Calliope’s Sisters: A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art (New York: Pearson, 1989). 7 H. Gene Blocker, “Non-Western Aesthetics as a Colonial Invention,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35/4 (2001), 3–13, here 9. 8 Robert Farris Thompson, “Yoruba Artistic Criticism” in The Traditional Artist in African Societies, ed. Warren d’Azevedo (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), 19–61; James Fernandez, “Principles of Opposition and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25/1 (1966), 53–64; Susan Vogel, Baulé: African Art, Western Eyes (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997); on Yoruba art see, too, the more recent study by Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014). 9 Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 183–198. 10 Firth, “Art and Anthropology” (cf. note 4), 24. 11 Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (cf. note 9), 198. 12 Charles Darwin, “Natural Selection” in On the Origin of Species (1859) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 130–172.

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13 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (London: Williams and Northgate, 1863), I, 444. Darwin later adopted the term in the 5th edition of The Origin of Species (1869). 14 Darwin, On the Origin of Species (cf. note 12), 137. 15 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (1879), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). 16 Ibid., 684. 17 See, for example, Antoinette Blackwell, The Sexes throughout Nature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1875), and Eliza Gamble, The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of her Inferiority to Man (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1894). 18 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life and Art (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2011). 19 Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism (London: Macmillan & Co., 1889). 20 Darwin, “Secondary Sexual Characters of Mammals” and “Secondary Sexual Characters of Man” in The Descent of Man (cf. note 15), 588–619 and 621–674. 21 Wolfgang Welsch, “Animal Aesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics 2 (2004). Available online at: www.contempaesthetics.org. (accessed 13 January 2014). 22 Darwin, The Descent of Man (cf. note 15), 115. 23 Ibid. 24 See, for example, Winfried Menninghaus, Wozu Kunst? Ästhetik nach Darwin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 76–96. 25 Clive Catchpole and Peter Slater, Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), 171–202. 26 Darwin, The Descent of Man (cf. note 15), 115–116. 27 Anthony O’Hear, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 182. 28 Herbert Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” Fraser’s Magazine 56 (1857), 396–408. In the second edition of the essay published in 1891, Spencer added a coda that took violent exception to Darwin’s idea of the role of birdsong in sexual selection. See Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music” in Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), II, 400–451. 29 Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man (London: John Murray, 1872). 30 On this topic see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal 25/1 (2002), 61–69; Sir Ernst Gombrich, “Aby Warburg. His Aims and Methods: An Anniversary Lecture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999), 268–282 and Ernst Gombrich, “Aby Warburg und der Evolutionismus des 19. Jahrhunderts” in Aby M. Warburg. Ekstatische Nymphe und Trauernder Flussgott. Porträt eines Gelehrten, ed. Robert Gallitz and Brita Reimers (Hamburg: Dölling und Gallitz, 1995), 52–73. 31 Ernst Grosse, Die Anfänge der Kunst (Stuttgart: J. C. B. Mohr, 1894), 280. Translated into English as The Beginnings of Art (New York: Appleton 1897); Yrjö Hirn, The Origins of Art: A Psychological and Sociological Inquiry (London: Macmillan, 1900). 32 Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975). 33 Ibid., 289. 34 Wilson was the object of a fierce critique in Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1977). For a brief overview of the debates over sociobiology, see Hilary Rose, “Colonising the Social Sciences?” in Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (London: Vintage, 2001), 106–128. 35 Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982). 36 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). 37 For an overview, see Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). 38 A succinct statement of this position is Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997). See, too, Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind:

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Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), for a now classic collection of essays stating the nativist position. Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994). Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Co-Operation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2012). Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996). See, too, Steven Mithen, “A Creative Explosion? Theory of Mind, Language and the Disembodied Mind of the Upper Palaeolithic” in Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory, ed. Steven Mithen (London: Routledge, 1998), 122–140. See, for example, Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991); Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). More recently, see Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution” in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 3–20, and Nancy Easterlin, “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind,” New Literary History 44/4 (2013), 661–682. Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John Johnson, and Daniel Kruger, “Paleolithic Politics in British Novels of the Longer Nineteenth Century” in Evolution, Literature and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd and Joseph Carroll (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010), 490– 506. Examples of such evolutionary accounts include Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979); David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). JoAnn Wypijewski, ed., Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998). The results of the poll can be found at: http://awp.diaart.org/km/ (accessed 25 November 2014). Arthur Danto, “Modalities of History” in Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 193–220. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and the Human Evolution, Oxford (Oxford: Univ. Press, 2009), 18. See, for example, Gordon H. Orians and Judith H. Heerwagen, “Evolved Responses to Landscapes” in The Adapted Mind (cf. note 43), 555–580. Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (New York: Wiley 1975). Grant Hildebrand, The Origins of Architectural Pleasure (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999). Ibid., 26. Dutton, The Art Instinct (cf. note 49), 141. Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (London: Vintage, 2001). Ibid., 281. Camilla Power, “Beauty Magic. The Origins of Art” in The Evolution of Culture, ed. Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999), 91–112. Marek Kohn and Steven Mithen, “Handaxes: Products of Sexual Selection?,” Antiquity 73 (1999), 518–526. Ibid., 521. Pagel, Wired for Culture (cf. note 40), 133. See, for example, Bernd Heinrich, “The Biological Roots of Aesthetics and Art,” Evolutionary Psychology 11/3 (2013), 743–761. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005). Ibid., 152. Lisa Zunshine, “Introduction: What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), 1–33. See, too,

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Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction. Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2006). See, for example, Ellen Spolsky and Alan Richardson, eds., The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Complexity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004); Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011); Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012); Christopher Collins, Palaeopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2013). Ellen Spolsky, “Introduction: Iconotropism, or Turning towards Pictures” in Iconotropism: Turning Towards Pictures, ed. Ellen Spolsky (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2004), 16: “… human beings feed on pictures, metabolize them — turn them into nourishment — because we need the knowledge they provide …” Ellen Spolsky, “Making ‘Quite Anew’: Brian Modularity and Creativity,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine, (cf. note 64), 85. Frederick Turner, “An Ecopoetics of Beauty and Meaning” in Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, ed. Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner (Lexington: ICF, 1999), 119–120. John Baines, “On the Status and Purpose of Ancient Egyptian Art” in Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 298–337; James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995); Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 259– 263. Darwin, The Descent of Man (cf. note 15), 246. Darwin goes on to add: “A more just comparison would be between the taste for the beautiful in animals and that in the lowest savages, who deck themselves with any brilliant, glittering or curious object.” On this issue see Stefan Snaevarr, “Talk to the Animals. A Short Comment on Wolfgang Welsch’s ‘Animal Aesthetics’,” Contemporary Aesthetics 2 (2004). Available online at: www.contempaesthetics.org. (accessed 13 January 2014. On the distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 91. Stephen Davies, The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 12–15. Stephen Davies, “Ellen Dissanayake’s Evolutionary Aesthetic,” Evolutionary Biology 20/2 (2005), 291–304, here 299. As Richard Woodfield has also stated: “A prime difference between animals and humans is the latter’s ability to reflect on their behaviour … A theory of art that is adequate to the world’s greatest achievement must incorporate, in some way or other, a theory of reflection.” Woodfield, “Review of Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 41/3 (2001), 345. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (cf. note 35), 35–38. Ibid., 38. Ibid. John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 138. George Hersey, The Evolution of Allure: Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Ibid., xiv–xv. Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (cf. note 77), 142, acknowledges that in some cultures — he cites the Yomibato of Peru — obesity seems to be an ideal of feminine beauty. Yet he tries to accommodate this by stating that this must relate to the fact that in the ancestral Yomybato environment food must have been so scarce that obesity was desirable for other reasons. Acknowledging that this is an untested hypothesis (one might add that it is untestable) he still treats the Yomybato as the exception that proves the rule, rather than considering that the argument marshalled here could apply to any culture (i.e. that is there no universal set of biologically rooted constants that shape aesthetic preferences, but that the latter are always related to the specific circumstances of each society). Richard Lewontin, “Sociobiology as an Adaptationist Programme,” Behavioural Science 24/1 (1979), 5–14, here 11.

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82 Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 205 (1979), 581–598. As a subsequent observer has commented, “Just-so stories lack the support of evidence and the careful weighing of evidence that are crucial to historical narratives. They result from the wanton extrapolation of crude adaptation models and perhaps the fabrication of ‘facts’ to substantiate their claims.” Sunny Auyang, Foundations of Complex Systems Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 333. 83 Jonathan Kramnick, “Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to my Critics,” Critical Inquiry 38/2 (2012), 431-460, here 446. The argument is referring to Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2003); Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010); Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010). 84 Robert Brandon, Adaptation and Environment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 159– 162. 85 Brian Boyd, “Art and Evolution: The Avant-Garde as Test Case: Spiegelmann in The Narrative Corpse” in Evolution, Literature and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010), 434. 86 Dan Sperber has made a similar point: “… most cultural institutions do not affect the chances of survival the groups involved to an extent that would explain their persistence.” Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 48. 87 In Wozu Kunst? (cf. note 24), 196, Menninghaus notes the adaptive function of play in the animal world; it is a way of practicing hunting skills, or various social skills within the group. Hence, aesthetic play has its roots in adaptive behaviour. This is not a decisive argument, however. For even if the roots of play can be traced back to adaptive “proto-play,” that says nothing about the role of aesthetic play now in uncoupling artistic practices from the evolutionary pressures that might have first favoured their emergence. Moreover, it might simply underline the difference between animal proto-play and human play. 88 Kevin Laland and Michael J. O’Brian, “Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17/4 (2010), 323–355. 89 John Odling-Smee, “Niche Construction, Evolution and Culture” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 1994), 162–196. 90 The key works were Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), and Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). An outline of the debate is provided by Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown, Sense and Nonsense (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). 91 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999). 92 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003). 93 Ibid., 19. 94 Ibid., 36. 95 Ibid., 435. 96 Ibid., 88–89. 97 Tomasello, The Cultural Origins (cf. note 91), 86. 98 Summers, Real Spaces (cf. note 92), 89. 99 See Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler, eds., German Art History and Scientific Thought (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 100 Davies, The Artful Species (cf. note 72), 122. 101 Joseph Carroll, “Theory, Anti-Theory and Empirical Criticism” in Biopoetics, ed. Cooke and Turner, (cf. note 68), 147. 102 Ibid. 103 Frederick Turner, “An Ecopoetics of Beauty and Meaning” in Biopoetics, ed. Cooke and Turner (cf. note 68), 119–120.

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104 Jan Faye, After Postmodernism: A Naturalistic Reconstruction of the Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 42. 105 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 7–8.

GEORG VASOLD

The Revaluation of Art History An Unfinished Project by Josef Strzygowski and His School Recent debates on the content and objectives of a global art history have been accompanied by an increasing number of questions about its historical foundations. Is the degree of attention that is now devoted to non-Western art really such a new phenomenon, or does it have its own history? Is it the case, as one often reads, that people only started looking at art from a global perspective after the profound economic and geopolitical changes of the late twentieth century, with the year 1989 generally being cited as the decisive caesura? Was it really the present generation of art critics and historians who first recognised the Eurocentric bias of their subject and started to clamour for its revision? And lastly, is there any truth in the notion that all prior art-historical research was confined to national historiographies and as a consequence never even tried to replace the national paradigm with the idea of an international art, a global art or a world art? No small amount of energy has been dedicated to answering this question of late, and though our historiographical knowledge remains fragmentary there can now be no doubt that the current concern with non-Western art is by no means new. On the contrary, it is quite easy to show that art historians have been looking beyond the borders of Europe and seeking to explain and understand what they found there ever since the formation of the discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. In the years around 1900 in particular there were many researchers who started to go beyond mere descriptions of the alterity of non-European artefacts and actually began to concern themselves with the multifarious relationships between European and non-European art, that is, with the mutual influences, dependencies and interactions between them, even if the resulting value system was often very rigid and generally tended to present European art as the apogee of global development.1 In any case, from around 1890 to 1930 the topic was an extremely popular one among art historians, and it is a striking fact that most of the researchers who were interested in world art came from the German-speaking countries.2 Karl Woermann, Ernst Grosse, Cornelius Gurlitt, Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Julius von Schlosser, Franz Wickhoff and many others were actively and in some cases intensively engaged with Asian, American and Oceanic art. And like Franz Kugler and Karl Schnaase in the mid-nineteenth century, they too endeavoured to write world art history. Josef Strzygowski occupies a special position within this band of prominent researchers, for his engagement with non-Western art was far more than just a brief

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chapter in his career; he actually dedicated almost all of his working life to it and spent decades struggling to overcome what he saw as the problematic paradigms of European art history. The fact that his own assumptions were often equally untenable and that he became increasingly racist and antisemitic with age have rightly been underlined on numerous occasions in the past.3 Nonetheless, having been consigned to oblivion for decades, this forgotten Viennese art historian is now being rediscovered in a number of places, mainly on account of his methodological contributions to world art history.4 This new-found interest in Strzygowski centres on a theoretical work he published in 1923, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften. This book, conceived in the context of a lecture tour of the United States, was, according to one source, “the most extensive programmatic text to date on the objectives and organisational forms of comparative research on the visual arts,”5 and has been described in more general terms as “one of the fundamental methodological texts of a world art history.”6 The following paper neither validates nor revises these judgements. It merely sets out to make a few remarks on the concepts and, in particular, the organisational steps that Strzygowski and his school identified as being necessary in order to bring about their idea of a world art history. For this Viennese researcher, the Europe-wide enthusiasm for foreign artistic cultures was by no means just a fleeting academic fashion. On the contrary: he thought that a turn towards neglected areas of artistic production––including non-Western art––was the most pressing task facing the art historians of his day. The geopolitical upheavals of the First World War, which gave pause to academics at universities on both sides of the Atlantic, brought Strzygowski to the realisation that the scope of art-historical research needed to be expanded.7 This had to happen both geographically (through the inclusion non-Western art) and temporally (through the consideration of prehistoric and ancient artefacts), and no-one could justifiably set about writing a world history of art until such a “revaluation of art history”––as another author put it in 1923––had taken place.8 Strzygowski believed that his subject could not truly be called a modern academic discipline until that had happened. Whether or not Strzygowski’s approach was successful or pioneering is of secondary importance to this discussion. Its principal aim is to illuminate at least some aspects of the historical context of his work. This in turn should serve as a reminder that the world history of art as conceived in Strzygowski’s day was far more than just an addendum to existing academic research and actually set out to rethink the discipline entirely, both in theory and in practice. Strzygowski knew full well that attaining this goal would be a struggle and, in order to bring about his intended revaluation of art history, he came up with a well-considered plan––a plan in which students and colleagues would play a central role.9 This paper will reconstruct Strzygowski’s plan, at least in outline, using his own terminology, for he spent years calling for a systematic, “planned approach” (planmäßiges Vorgehen)10 and a “professional working plan” (fachmännischen Arbeitsplan) in order to achieve his goals.11 In doing so it covers at least two points. Firstly it will show that Strzygowski and his school were sometimes genuinely innovative in their actions. Secondly it proposes to answer the question as to why his school––a

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whole generation of art historians––subsequently fell into almost complete obscurity.

“An Entirely New Type of Research Institute” When Josef Strzygowski was appointed to a professorship at the University in Vienna in 1909 he was already known as an expert in non-Western art. This reputation was based mainly on an article of 1903 that dealt chiefly with Asian textiles, while also articulating a strong interest in the question of artistic mobility. In this article he focused on the various reciprocal effects or interdependencies (Wechselwirkungen) between the art of China, Persia and Syria in Late Antiquity.12 Although Strzygowski was severely criticised for his idea that Chinese culture had influenced that of the Near East, the article was actually a ground-breaking piece of scholarship.13 Even sixty years later Rudolf Wittkower had to admit that it was still worth reading because Strzygowski had “opened the scholarly discussion of transmissions.”14 Being convinced of the necessity of what was later called “a proposal for the complete reorganisation of art history” (ein Vorschlag zur völligen Neuordnung der Kunstgeschichte),15 Strzygowski soon went a step further and sketched out the lineaments of his vision. Though they were still rather vague at this point, he presented his ideas while chairing the Eighth International Congress for Art History in Darmstadt in 1907. Strzygowski was emphatic in proposing alternatives to the dominant national art histories, replacing them with or at least extending them to an explicitly international scope. In doing so he encouraged his colleagues at the congress to set up a journal that would not only cover European art, but also oriental, East-Asian, and prehistoric art as well.16 In methodological terms Strzygowski took up the position of a global, “comparative developmental history” (einen vergleichenden entwicklungsgeschichtlichen Standpunkt), that is, he adopted a synchronic rather than a diachronic approach. “In this way, the currently accepted method of looking at artistic monuments in chronological order will very soon be transformed into a comparative method, whereby the modern can quite feasibly stand alongside an Antique or a Japanese work of art”.17 Besides the reference to comparative art history, which Strzygowski long regarded as the only adequate method of art-historical research, there are two points worth considering here. The first is his call for art history to distance itself from the paradigm of national historiography. Strzygowski was emphatic in stating that art history would have to become a collaborative endeavour if it was to keep in step with the times, a labour “in which all nations can be involved.”18 The second point that stands out here is that consideration of modern art is included as a matter of course. While Strzygowski was certainly not the first art historian to show interest in Modernism, and even said some very disparaging things about contemporary artists on occasion, he was nevertheless convinced that art historians also had to be open to contemporary artistic production. One consequence of this belief was a

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book on contemporary art written in 1906/07 and expressly aimed at a wide readership, with a second edition appearing in 1923.19 But the plan Strzygowski proposed in Darmstadt initially came to nothing; he had been far too optimistic. The German scholars in particular were unwilling to give up their national conception of art. Strzygowski, however, did not give up, and two years later he believed he had finally reached his goal when he was appointed professor in Vienna. As the capital of a multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic empire, Vienna was perhaps the best place in Europe for someone who wanted to reform the discipline by emphasising criteria other than that of the nation. All the more so since the main representatives of the so-called Vienna school of art history had quite similar ideas. Alois Riegl, for instance, was one of the first art historians ever to have used the term “world art” (Weltkunst). And in an obituary to Franz Wickhoff, who died in 1909, we read that he regarded the idea of a “new universal art history” (eine neue Universalgeschichte) 20 as the most relevant and pressing problem of all. So Strzygowski seemed to be in the right place, and soon after arriving in Vienna he published a number of articles promoting his concepts. Full of self-confidence, he wrote that The [newly founded] department for art history at the University of Vienna represents … an entirely new type of research institute. It seeks to go beyond the narrow European framework [and] aspires to a knowledge of all the artefacts of the whole world, from all periods and social strata.21

In order to implement his ideas he completely restructured his department. First of all, he purchased as many books on non-Western art as possible. When the department was eventually dissolved in 1933, its library contained some four thousand volumes. On top of that, research and study facilities included fifty-two thousand photographs and almost twenty thousand slides or Strahlbilder.22 Until 1922 the books were shelved under the categories of Eastern Asia and Western Europe, Islam, Western Asia, Eastern Europe, Austria and Town Planning. There was also a so-called “systematic department” (probably containing reference works and literature on art theory), a lecture room and a dedicated bindery. In 1922 the institute moved to new, somewhat larger premises at Hörlgasse 6, and this entailed a thematic reorganisation of the library. Here the books were categorised under Asia/ Islam, Europe (both including subcategories for north and south), Essentialist Studies (Wesenswissenschaft) (including modern art) and Developmental Studies (Entwicklungswissenschaft). This articulation almost perfectly mirrors the system that Strzygowski had proposed in his book, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften. Besides the abovementioned departments there was also a room for compendia and dictionaries, a bindery (with a dark room) and a production room for the institute’s own publications. The existence of this facility, which was referred to as a publisher or Verlag, made sense because Strzygowski had founded two series of publications that served as a platform for the work of his students and for many of his own studies.23 It was clearly an attempt to circumvent any reliance on the Austrian pub-

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lishing industry, which encountered major difficulties during the economic crises of the 1920s.

Expansion Urges and Global Culture: Strzygowski’s Colleague Erwin Hanslik It is evident that Strzygowski’s department was primarily structured along geographical lines and according to geographical parameters, so it is no wonder that his books and articles up to around 1920 contain frequent instances of the terms “cultural region” (Kulturkreis) and “artistic region” (Kunstkreis). In Strzygowski’s day these terms were quite new and became the subject of some lively debate, particularly among geographers.24 Indeed, this concentration on geography––combined with the comparative approach––was the main methodological focus of Strzygowski’s department for quite some time. He and his assistants published articles in geographical journals, recommended the work of prominent geographers such as Carl Ritter and Ferdinand von Richthofen and praised Alexander von Humboldt for having “opened up a view onto the world as a whole” (das Weltganze).25 The extent to which Strzygowski and his pupils regarded maps as an important medium for art historians becomes clear when reading Heinrich Glück’s dissertation on Der Breit- und Langhausbau in Syrien auf kulturgeographischer Grundlage. Glück worked as Strzygowski’s assistant from 1917 until 1928, and the foreword to his dissertation underlined the general epistemological importance of maps while also providing instructions on how to use them. He wanted his reader to have a map of Syria to hand at all times (there was one appended to his book) and maintained that the written text could not be fully understood without it.26 Maps would retain this central importance in Glück’s work. In 1921, for instance, he claimed that the art of the Renaissance was ultimately just one “offshoot of a great current” (Ausläufer eines großen Stromes)27 that had found its way from East Asia to Europe. This was a common assertion among members of Strzygowski’s circle, and Glück used maps in his visual attempt to demonstrate its validity (fig. 1). Strzygowski knew perfectly well that fulfilling his goals and establishing the “comparative study of art on a geographical basis” (vergleichende Kunstforschung auf geographischer Grundlage) would require professional assistance.28 So in 1916 he engaged the now almost entirely forgotten geographer Erwin Hanslik, a “most enigmatic personality”29 who was born in the same town as Strzygowski and had a strong affinity for the fine arts.30 Hanslik was absolutely typical of the Strzygowski circle. Firstly, he was on familiar terms with the most famous artists in Vienna: Egon Schiele was one of his closest friends, but he also knew Otto Wagner, Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt. Hanslik was no exception in this respect; quite the opposite: many members of the Strzygowski circle (including Strzygowski himself ) had close connections to contemporary art. To give just a couple of examples: Stella Kramrisch spent her whole life writing about contemporary Austrian artists and, later on, about contemporary Indian artists; and Leopold Speneder, an expert on

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Fig. 1: Illustration (map) from Heinrich Glück, “Das kunstgeographische Bild Europas am Ende des Mittelalters und die Grundlagen der Renaissance” (1921/22)

Indian architecture, published a book on The Art of Our Time in which he sought to identify a structural analogy or an “analogous disposition” (gleiche Gesinnung) that was common to both Western and non-Western art31 (fig. 2). The second thing that made Hanslik so interesting to Strzygowski was the fact that, in an attempt to revise European geography, almost all his books were illustrated with maps. Among other things, he wanted to demonstrate where the continent’s cultural borderlines had really been (fig. 3). According to Hanslik, the distribution of Europeans––the white race, as he put it––did not correspond even remotely to the political frontiers of the continent. And with the help of dozens of maps (many of them made by Czech artist Berthold Bartosch, who was studying in Vienna at the time), Hanslik sought to produce visual proof that European culture extended far beyond the Mediterranean, covering almost fifty per cent of Africa. It is not necessary to draw further attention to the strong imperialistic connotations of Hanslik’s “geopolitical megalomania.”32 His use of maps was undoubtedly an instance of the attempt to “take control of the world visually and politically.”33 So it is not at all surprising that while many of Hanslik’s contemporaries were fascinated by his ideas––the expressionist writer Robert Müller was a case in point–– he also elicited some criticism.34 One anonymous reviewer of his book Österreich. Erde und Geist (1917), for instance, simply called him a fool, and that same year the

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Fig. 2: Illustration from Leopold Speneder, Die Kunst in unserer Zeit (1931): Mitla ruins, Oaxaca, Mexico, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1924

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Fig. 3: Map “Die Kulturgemeinschaften der europäischen Völker,” from Erwin Hanslik, Österreich als Naturforderung (1917)

German philosopher Ernst Bloch referred to his theories as the “ejaculations of a rotten mind” (Ejakulationen eines durchlöcherten Gehirns).35 Strzygowski, however, was impressed. He too began illustrating his books with maps, as did his assistants. It may well be the case that they were politically less radical than Hanslik himself, but it is certainly true that geopolitical cartography was very popular in the interwar period and that Viennese art historians willingly contributed to that discourse.36 In 1918 Strzygowski published an article in which he reflected on the geography of Asian art and called “for a broader conception of Europe, one that takes the Amu Darya and Indus Rivers as the border between Asia and Europe” (den Begriff Europa weiter zu fassen und die Amudarja-Indusgrenze als Grenze zwischen Asien und Europa aufzustellen).37 Strzygowski’s desire to rethink these continental borderlines was certainly related to the ongoing war and, at least in part, was a consequence of Austria’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908, which had caused people all over Europa to start asking themselves where the continent ended.38 In any case, by referring to these discussions Hanslik and Strzygowski

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were able to demonstrate that world art history was an eminently modern science that held the answers to some burning political questions. Another thing that made Hanslik so appealing to Strzygowski was his desire to popularise the idea of a world culture, which is to say: his notion of transcending national boundaries and living and working in the global context. In 1915 Hanslik opened what was then called the Viennese Institute for Cultural Research (Wiener Institut für Kulturforschung). It was intended as the first step in a much bigger enterprise, namely the foundation of a “World University” and a “World Museum.”39 With the support of Gustav Klimt and various other luminaries, Hanslik edited his own journal, Erde, which was published in Vienna and Berlin and would for several years remain the preferred platform for the popularisation of his ideas. And Hanslik was certainly ambitious: one of the first things he did was to write a letter to the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, asking for the support he needed to bring about his idea of a world culture.40 It is not known whether Wilson ever responded, but Hanslik was so convinced of his ideas that, as a second step, he travelled to Sweden, where he got in touch with a number of art historians, artists and writers, among them Selma Lagerlöf, Sven Hedin and Ellen Key. And in 1917 he was planning to open a branch of his Viennese Institute in Stockholm in an attempt to re-establish the transnational cultural contacts that had been severed during the war.41 Hanslik’s next step took him to Germany. In July 1919 another Institute for Cultural Research was opened, this time in Berlin, on Niederwallstraße 18–20, near the Spittelmarkt. Led by the art historian and filmmaker Hans Cürlis, the Berlin institute mainly served as a meeting point for German and Austrian filmmakers. It was no coincidence that the leading figure at the Berlin Institute was a filmmaker. Like Strzygowski, Hanslik had also realised that the broad dissemination of his ideas would best be achieved not through temporary exhibition projects but through the relatively new medium of film.42 In 1918 he initiated a major cinematographic undertaking, the so-called “world film project Humanity” (Weltfilmwerk Menschheit), which set out to gather up and visually present knowledge about the whole world. As a subject, world geography was to be put on an equal footing with anthropology, religion, the lifestyles of the various nations, the global economy, the re-establishment of nation states after 1918, historic architecture, the construction of modern housing estates, literature and, last but not least, “world art.“43 It is understandable that so substantial an undertaking could never be finished, but parts of it were in fact realised. Together with Cürlis and a student of Strzygowski’s––the East-Asia researcher Karl With––Hanslik did produce the first chapter of his film, which was shown in Vienna, Leipzig and Berlin––in the presence of German and Austrian diplomats and a handful of journalists. Quite what they saw is not entirely clear; the film is now lost. However, contemporary reports suggests that it was probably a series of drawn animations in which short sequences of film visualised the differences between various peasant architectures and compared the “cultural opposition between eastern and western Europe” (Kulturgegensatz zwischen dem europäischen Osten und Westen).44 Hanslik’s idea was “to produce a political world review.”45 And for all the imperialist fantasies, his intentions were

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Fig. 4a: Film still from Negerplastik (1919, directed by Hans Cürlis)

Fig. 4b: Film still from Plastische Bildwerke (1919, directed by Hans Cürlis)

ultimately pacifist. By presenting knowledge of foreign cultures and making it accessible to a large audience, he wanted to help minimise the sorts of tensions that had led to world war, believing as he did that these tensions were based on ignorance. Reviewers of his film realised this and responded very positively to it. Viennese readers of the Neue Kino-Rundschau were told that Hanslik’s scientific aspirations had entered uncharted territory and that his film had taken “the first steps on a path that opens up good prospects for the future.”46 Encouraged by this, from 1919 onward Hanslik and his friends produced a number of short films, which they called Kulturfilme.47 Most of the films no longer exist, but we at least know what they were about. Between 1919 und 1922 Cürlis completed ten of these short films, each of them about four minutes long, with eight of them covering non-European art. Cürlis and his team (among them Berthold Bartosch, who had left Vienna for Berlin to work as a cameraman by this point) visited the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin to film Indian, African and East-Asian statues. Contemporary critics were enthusiastic and reserved special praise for the aesthetics of the African sculptures, because the films, so the critics said, made the shadows of the artworks clearly visible, bringing out the haptic dimension of the statues and “showcasing the incredible plasticity of these negro sculptures”48 (fig. 4a + b).

The School of Josef Strzygowski: An Unexplored Chapter of Art History The attempt to popularise world art went beyond the use of popular new media; it was also reflected in Strzygowski’s lecture courses. From 1911 he regularly offered lectures and seminars on the “world history of art” (Weltgeschichte der Kunst) (the

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title of a lecture course given in the winter semester of 1911/12), although the emphasis was very much on Asian art. And though African and American art never featured on the institute’s readings lists, students could choose to write their dissertations on these topics.49 To give an idea of the quantity of academic output that emerged from Strzygowski’s department, it might be useful to cite some statistics. In the period between 1909 and 1933, when Strzygowski retired, he supervised about a hundred and twenty dissertations. More than forty were dedicated exclusively to non-Western art. In addition to that there were about twenty-five other dissertations that dealt primarily with European art but also analysed its relationship to non-European cultures. Olga Schwanenfeld could be named here. She wrote her dissertation on Pisanello, exploring the extent to which the Tuscan painter absorbed Asian influences, a subject that attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in the 1920s, not only in Austria and Germany, but also in France and Great Britain.50 So altogether there were more than sixty dissertations by young scholars writing about world art. This quantity was absolutely unique in Europe. No other art-historical institute was so deeply involved with Asian and non-European art. Looking at the names of Strzygowski’s students, it is striking to see that more than fifty per cent of those who worked on non-European art were women. This provides some revealing insights into the status of world art historiography within western academia in the interwar period: we learn that non-European art history increasingly obtained a level of acceptance in the 1920s and was evidently one of the main fields (there were not many of them) in which female scholars were able to conduct original academic research. And this did in fact happen, at least sometimes. Austrian art historian Melanie Stiaßny, for instance, who wrote her dissertation on Chinese landscape painting in 1921, worked at the ethnographic department of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, where she was in charge of the Asian collection.51 In Austria she was certainly one of the central figures in her field, writing articles about East-Asian Art, organising exhibitions on the same subject and editing her own journal, the Wiener Beiträge zur Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte Asiens (1926–1938). Stiaßny also cofounded the so-called Verein der Freunde asiatischer Kunst und Kultur, an association for people interested in Asian art.52 The main activities of this association were to establish links to scholars from all over the world, inviting them to give public lectures in Vienna.53 Stiaßny’s intention here was to create an international academic dialogue among leading experts in Asian Art. But this alone was not enough. Strzygowski’s former students were well aware that they needed to reach mass audiences if they were to achieve the aim of popularising non-Western art. Consequently they got in touch with the directors of the Austrian Broadcasting Service (RAVAG) and persuaded them that it was necessary to open up the programme to new radio features. And so, from 1930 onward, Strzygowski’s former students finally went on air. Once a month, sometimes even more frequently, Austrian radio audiences were informed about Indian architecture, Chinese paintings and Japanese prints, and in order to illustrate what the

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Fig. 5: Radio program announcement “Zusammenhänge der europäischen mit der asiatischen Kunst,” Radio-Wien, 23 December 1932

scholars were talking about, the radio guides printed reproductions of some of the discussed artefacts in advance (fig. 5). And yet one has to ask why we don’t know anything about all these activities. How is it possible that even the experts in the field of art historiography have hardly ever heard of Hanslik, Stiaßny or Wolfgang Born––another of Strzygowski’s students, who organised a substantial exhibition of African Art in Vienna in 1934. This exhibition was so successful that the catalogue sold out within a week (fig. 6, pl. VI). There are several reasons that could be cited in answer to these questions: Firstly, while Josef Strzygowski was supportive of his students, he evidently didn’t trust them. For decades he forced them to apply his own way of thinking.54 He never accepted any methodological approach other than his own––which was highly problematic, because the older he got, the less interested he became in transculturality, in artistic interdependencies and in new, hybrid art forms. We have seen that his early writings contained some profound analyses of artistic transformation and interdependencies, but in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s he was mainly concerned with identifying what he referred to as the essence of art. Being infected with contemporary racial discourse, he increasingly spoke of blood and soil as the fundamental categories of art. As a result, many of his students’ dissertations are laced with the same terminology. Nevertheless, at least some of his students tried to resist, claiming that the criteria of blood and soil were of no relevance to art history. The case of Artur Wachsberger is instructive in this respect. He had written his dissertation on the art of East Turk-

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Fig. 6: Front cover of the exhibition catalogue Madsimu Dsangara (Die Schatten der Vergessenen), Vienna 1934

estan, describing it as a “Mischkunst” or hybrid art form, that is, an art that had no traditional core, but consisted of Indian, East-Asian and Hellenistic elements.55 Strzygowski was riled when he read Wachsberger’s dissertation. He accused him of having ignored local factors, which, in his view, always gave rise to immutable stylistic characteristics.56 He wanted his students to look for “the original nature of the real Asia” (das eigentliche Asien in seiner ursprünglichen Art).57 Indeed, the focus of Strzygowski’s own research increasingly called for the divorce of native forms from foreign influences in order to search for the origins of the relevant motifs.58 The conflict between Strzygowski and Wachsberger was symptomatic of the ideological positions at Strzygowski’s institute: whereas he himself was looking for the eternal, immutable and constant aspects of art––identifying these as the true basis of art as such––his students (or at least some of them) were willing to accept continuous artistic exchange. Sometimes they even tried to establish new terminology. Emmy Wellesz, for instance, who was working on Gandhara and Bactria, introduced the term “transit land” (Transitland ) to define Bactria’s art-historical status and to describe a fruitful process of aesthetic intermingling.59 The second reason we hardly know anything about these studies is the simple fact that a large proportion of them really are inferior. Artur Graf von Strachwitz–– to give just one example––wrote his dissertation on the cosmic aspects of art, looking for the origins of the Aryan race.60 Though Strachwitz was not really interested in Aryan ideology, Strzygowski urged him to write on the subject.61 The student willingly acceded and ultimately found just what his mentor was looking for: ac-

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cording to Strachwitz the first German artists lived on a sunken island somewhere in the far north, in Atlantis. Reason number three: diligent as Strzygowski and his school were in promoting non-Western art, they were actually rather unlucky. Despite Strzygowski’s plan to establish an in-house Verlag at his department, the serious economic crises of the 1920s prevented the publication of the majority of the dissertations. Although many of the typescripts were ready for print (at least according to Strzygowski’s account), very few of them were published, either in Austria or in Germany. But this was not the only external problem Strzygowski was confronted with. After he retired in 1933 he founded the Gesellschaft für vergleichende Kunstforschung, and though this institute was internationally recognised, in retrospect it is clear that Strzygowski and his school had simply chosen the wrong time and place to launch their society. The institute opened on 4 February 1934. Eight days later, the political and academic atmosphere in Vienna was radically changed by the outbreak of the Austrian Civil War. A fourth and final reason should also be mentioned. Although Strzygowski certainly held antisemitic views, many of his students were actually Jewish. And though some of them were able to leave Vienna after Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany (among them Emmy Wellesz, Melanie Stiaßny, Hilde Zaloscer), others were not so fortunate. Olga Schwanenfeld, for example, was deported and killed in 1942 or 1943. Two items from the 1930s are the only physical evidence of her life: a photograph at Yad Vashem and her unpublished dissertation in Vienna (fig. 7).

Closing Remarks Returning to the initial question of whether Strzygowski’s projected world history of art anticipated global art history, that is, whether his tireless engagement for the recognition of non-Western art threw up questions that are still relevant today, we can now say that this question can only properly be answered when more is known about the activities of his school. This is scarcely possible at present; the gaps in our knowledge of interwar Viennese art history are still too large. Although some promising steps have recently been taken towards rectifying these shortcomings, we still know far too little about the work of Strzygowski’s students; in many cases even their basic biographical data are not known. Nonetheless, there are several things that suggest that some of the steps taken by Strzygowski’s circle will be of relevance to current research projects, because at least some of them can be designated as proto-transcultural. Alongside certain aspects of Strzygowski’s research practices––such as the commitment to art-historical field research, that is, Strzygowski’s insistence that the local context of an artefact could not be understood unless investigations were conducted in situ––one could also cite certain theoretical developments. One especially important concern within Strzygowski’s circle seems to have been the search for terms that would be appropriate to Asian works of art. Emmy Wellesz stands out here, though one might also mention Arthur von Rosthorn, a longstanding contributor to the Wiener Beiträge zur Kunst und Kultur Asiens. Rosthorn, a diplomat and sinologist,

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Fig. 7: Olga Schwanenfeld (1900–1943?), passport photograph, c. 1918

went to great lengths to find terminology that was up to the task of describing Chinese landscape paintings in a way that would do justice to the artefacts in question, which were based on Chinese rather than European art theory.62 The tendency to operate beyond disciplinary boundaries and to incorporate and adapt results from adjacent disciplines was taken for granted among Strzygowski’s students, which is another thing that seems relevant now. Such attitudes are remarkable because they clearly show that the desire to transcend Western academic traditions often went hand in hand with an openness towards transdisciplinarity.63 Of course, this need not imply that transdisciplinarity was ever the ultima ratio of world art history in the Strzygowskian mould. Several of his students were clearly all too aware of the potential problems of such an approach. Stella Kramrisch, for instance, who initially shared Strzygowski’s racist views, quickly abandoned the notion of art geography in spite of her mentor’s high hopes for it.64 Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, as Strzygowski’s theories became increasingly crude and his view of art became increasingly essentialist, it seems at least some of his colleagues did come to see the deficiencies and flaws in his project––to say nothing of their issues with his ideological orientation. The Austrian government evidently took the same view. After Strzygowski’s retirement in 1933 his institute was simply shut down––despite the protests of his students––for economic reasons, or so the finance ministry said at the time. Strzygowski’s own academic work can and must be criticised, for one struggles to find there any trace of an open conception of art that might potentially be of use for today’s purposes, particularly in his later writings. His thinking was overly essentialist and tended towards racism, his theoretical edifice was full of contradictions, he was all too convinced of the correctness of his own path, that is, he was obstinately insistent on his own views, which made him more enemies than friends.

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At the same time, though, he was far too willing to take up dubious ideas and adopt untested, faddish slogans, which often resulted in him not being taken seriously as an academic.65 All this is certainly correct. But Strzygowski was also the spiritus rector of a school that, at least partly, acknowledged the Eurocentric heritage of its subject, addressed the issue of mobility and went to some lengths to devise new terminologies. It was a school that never shied away from transgressing disciplinary boundaries, called the national paradigm into question and promoted scientific exchange, particularly with Asian academics. Last of all, Strzygowski and his school were convinced that art history could not shut itself off in the ivory tower of science and instead had to maintain lively contact with artists and artworks––wherever they happened to be. For these things, at least, the controversial Viennese art historian deserves credit, despite all else.

Notes 1 Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen. “Weltkunst” und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne (Berlin: b_books, 2015). 2 Marlite Halbertsma, “The Many Beginnings and the One End of World Art History in Germany 1900–1930” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 91–105. 3 See for instance Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Reflections on World Art History” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 23–45, here 33; Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001), 18–24. 4 For recent scholarship, see especially Piotr Otto Scholz, ed., Von Biala nach Wien. Josef Strzygowski und die Kunstwissenschaft (Schlangenbad and Vienna: European Univ. Press Verlagsgesellschaft, 2015). 5 Joachim Rees, “Vergleichende Verfahren––verfahrene Vergleiche. Kunstgeschichte als komparative Kunstwissenschaft––eine Problemskizze,” Kritische Berichte 40/2 (2012), 32–47, here 37. 6 Ulrich Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000)” in World Art Studies (cf. note 2), 69–89, here 81. 7 See for instance Jesse Frederick Steiner, The Japanese Invasion: A Study in the Psychology of Inter-Racial Contacts (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1917). 8 Oskar Beyer, Welt-Kunst. Von der Umwertung der Kunstgeschichte (Dresden: Sibyllen-Verlag, 1923). 9 A small handful of people have just recently begun to look more closely at the role of Strzygowski’s school. See Julia Orell, “Early East Asian Art History in Vienna and its Trajectories: Josef Strzygowski, Karl With, Alfred Salmony,” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2015), https:// doaj.org/article/010623a9b5ae44ef9daa2eed4dccaa8b (last accessed June 2016), and Burcu Dogramaci, “Kunstgeschichte in Istanbul. Die Begründung der Disziplin durch den Wiener Kunsthistoriker Ernst Diez” in Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich.” Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken, ed. Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters and Barbara Schellewald (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), 114–133. 10 Josef Strzygowski, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften. Vorgeführt am Beispiel der Forschung über bildende Kunst (Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co., 1923), 66. 11 Josef Strzygowski, “Heinrich Glück †,” Artibus Asiae 4/2–3 (1930–32), 165–167, here 165. 12 Josef Strzygowski, “Seidenstoffe aus Ägypten im Kaiser Friedrich-Museum. Wechselwirkungen zwischen China, Persien und Syrien in spätantiker Zeit,” Jahrbuch der Preußischen Kunstsammlun'gen 24 (1903), 147–178. 13 Franz Wickhoff, for instance, thought Strzygowski’s theory was nonsense, nothing but a “bad new fashion” (schlechte neue Mode). See Franz Wickhoff, [Review of:] “Moriz Dreger, Künstlerische

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Entwicklung der Weberei und Stickerei, innerhalb des europäischen Kulturkreises von der spätantiken Zeit bis zum Beginne des 19. Jahrhunderts, mit Ausschluss der Volkskunst,” Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen 1/4 (1904), 120–125, here 125. Donald Martin Reynolds, ed., Selected Lectures of Rudolf Wittkower: The Impact of Non-European Civilizations on the Art of the West (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 228. Paul Sock, “Das Wachstum der Kunstschau Josef Strzygowski’s” in Josef Strzygowski 70 Jahre (Katowice: Kattowitzer Buchdruckerei- u. Verlags-Sp. Akc., 1932), 17. Offizieller Bericht über die Verhandlungen des VIII. Internationalen Kunsthistorischen Kongresses in Darmstadt (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1907), 29. The participants of the congress came from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway and Romania. Josef Strzygowski, “Nationale Kunstgeschichte und internationale Kunstwissenschaft,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 1 (1907), 574–578, here 577. Ibid., 576. Josef Strzygowski, Die Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart. Ein Büchlein für jedermann (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1907). For Strzygowski’s verbal attacks on, for instance, Oskar Kokoschka, see Edwin Lachnit, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte und die Kunst ihrer Zeit. Zum Verhältnis von Methode und Forschungsgegenstand am Beginn der Moderne (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2005), 115–118. Max Dvořák, “Franz Wickhoff” in Max Dvořák. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte, ed. Johannes Wilde and Karl M. Swoboda (Munich: R. Piper & Co, 1929), 299–312, here 311. Josef Strzygowski, “Das kunsthistorische Institut der Wiener Universität,” Die Geisteswissenschaften 1/1 (1 October 1913), 12–14. For further details on the department and its facilities, see “Anhang: Das Erste kunsthistorische Institut der Universität Wien” in Josef Strzygowski-Festschrift. Zum 70. Geburtstag dargebracht von seinen Schülern (Klagenfurt: Artur Kollitsch, 1932), 192–194; and Viktor Grießmeier and Fritz Novotny, “Das 1. Kunsthistorische Institut der Wiener Universität” in Josef Strzygowski 70 Jahre (cf. note 15), 46–48. Arbeiten des Kunsthistorischen Instituts der Universität Wien (1914–1933); Beiträge zur vergleichenden Kunstforschung (1920–1936). Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 74–75; Simone Hespers, Kunstlandschaft. Eine terminologische und methodologische Untersuchung zu einem kunstwissenschaftlichen Raumkonzept (Stuttgart: S. Hirzel, 2007). Strzygowski, Die Krisis (cf. note 10), 44. Heinrich Glück, Der Breit- und Langhausbau in Syrien auf kulturgeographischer Grundlage (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1916), 1: “The map and the plates should be taken as essential elements of the present work and are to be used as such at all times; they are to be kept in sight even when the text does not explicitly refer to them, for it is a matter of some importance to this work that the individual monument always be seen both in its geographical place and as a part of the artistic strata to which it is assigned” (Die Karte und die Tafeln sind als wesentliche Bestandteile der vorliegenden Arbeit aufzufassen uns als solche immer zu benutzen; sie sind auch dort, wo im Text nicht eigens auf sie verwiesen wird, immer vor Augen zu halten, da es in dieser Arbeit von Wichtigkeit ist, das Einzeldenkmal immer in seiner geographische Stellung sowie in der künstlerischen Schichte zu sehen, in der es eingeordnet ist). Heinrich Glück, “Das kunstgeographische Bild Europas am Ende des Mittelalters und die Grundlagen der Renaissance,” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 14/2 (1921/22), 161–173, here 167. Josef Strzygowski, “Vergleichende Kunstforschung auf geographischer Grundlage,” Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien 61 (1918), 20–48 and 153–158. Karl With, Autobiography of Ideas. Memoirs of an Extraordinary Art Scholar (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1997), 93. See Kimberly A. Smith, “Schiele, Hanslik, and the Allure of the Natural Nation,” Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002), 163–205; Franz Smola, “Vom Menschenbewusstsein zum neuen Menschenbild–Egon Schiele und der Anthropogeograph Erwin Hanslik” in Die ästhetische Gnosis der Moderne, ed. Leander Kaiser and Michael Ley (Vienna: Passagen, 2008), 123–146. Leopold Speneder, Die Kunst in unserer Zeit. Eine Einführung (Vienna: Reinhold-Verlag, 1931), 81.

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32 William M. Johnston, Der österreichische Mensch. Kulturgeschichte der Eigenart Österreichs (Vienna, Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 2010), 142. 33 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Der kartographische Blick der Kunst (Berlin: Merve, 1997), 45. For Hanslik’s use of maps see also Hans-Dietrich Schultz, “Europa: (k)ein Kontinent? Das Europa deutscher Geographen” in Welt-Räume. Geschichte, Geographie und Globalisierung seit 1900, ed. Iris Schröder and Sabine Höhler (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2005), 204–231. 34 Robert Müller called Hanslik’s Erde und Geist a “conscientious scholarly work by a man of evident intellect” (sauber gearbeitetes Gelehrtenwerk … von einem handgreiflichen Scharfsinn), see Robert Müller, Kritische Schriften II (= Werkausgabe Bd. 10) (Paderborn: Igel, 1995), 17. 35 “Ein bedenklicher Staatsroman,” Pester Lloyd, 8 January 1917, evening edition, 2–3, here 3; Ernst Bloch, Kampf, nicht Krieg. Politische Schriften 1917–1919 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 113. 36 Petra Svatek, “Geopolitische Kartographie in Österreich 1917–1937,” Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft 157 (2015), 301–322. My warm thanks to Petra Svatek for making the unpublished results of her research on Hanslik available to me. 37 Josef Strzygowski, “Ostasien im Rahmen vergleichender Kunstforschung,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 2/1 (1913/14), 1–19, here 3, note 2. 38 See for instance Adolf Harnack, “Der Geist der morgenländischen Kirche im Unterschied von der abendländischen,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1913, Erster Halbbd., 157–183. 39 See Monika Platzer, “Kinetismus = Pädagogik – Weltanschauung – Avantgarde” in Kinetismus. Wien entdeckt die Avantgarde, ed. Monika Platzer and Ursula Storch, exhibition catalogue Wien Museum (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 8–26, here 24. 40 Erwin Hanslik, “Weltaufruf an die Freunde von Einheit und Frieden,” Erde. Zeitung für Geistesarbeit der gesamten Menschheit (Organ der Weltkulturgesellschaft) 1/1–2 (1918), 1. 41 See Smola, “Vom Menschenbewusstsein” (cf. note 30), 126–127. Hanslik’s activities in Stockholm are mentioned by Elizabeth Clegg, “War and Peace at the Stockholm Austrian Art Exhibition,” The Burlington Magazine 154 (2012), 676–688. 42 One dissertation written at Strzygowski’s institute in 1932/32 covered the medium of film: Georg Hoppe, Film und Bildende Kunst: das Wesen des bewegten Lichtbildes und Entwicklungsfragen im Bezug auf die Bildende Kunst (Wien, Univ.-Diss., 1933). Strzygowski himself gave a lecture on “The significance of the audio-visual motion picture for the visual arts” (Die Bedeutung des bewegten und tönenden Lichtbildes für die Bildende Kunst) during the summer semester of 1933. 43 Erde. Zeitung für Geistesarbeit der gesamten Menschheit (Organ der Weltkulturgesellschaft) 3/5 (1919), 1. 44 “Wissenschaft im Film,” Neues Wiener Journal 27/9184 (28 May 1919), 6. 45 Erde. Zeitung für Geistesarbeit der gesamten Menschheit (Organ der Weltkulturgesellschaft) 3/5 (1919), cited in Ulrich Döge, Kulturfilm als Aufgabe. Hans Cürlis (1889–1982) (Berlin: CineGraph Babelsberg, 2005), 18. My thanks to Ulrich Döge for our fruitful conversations about the activities of Hans Cürlis. 46 “Wissenschaftliche Films,” Neue Kino-Rundschau, vol. 1919, no. 127 (9 August 1919), 4. 47 Bénédicte Savoy, “Vom Faustkeil zur Handgranate.” Filmpropaganda für die Berliner Museen 1834– 1939 (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2013). My warm thanks to Bénédicte Savoy for giving me further information about Cürlis and for helping me organise the film stills. 48 Cited in Hans Cürlis, “Bildende Kunst im Film,” Das Kulturfilmbuch, ed. Edgar Beyfuss and Alex Kossowsky (Berlin: Chryselius & Schultz, 1924), 215. 49 See Josef Strzygowski 70 Jahre (cf. note 15), 194: “The subject of a dissertation can be any problem from European or Asiatic, early American, African or Polynesian art, or an ethnographic topic in the broadest possible sense insofar at this encompasses artistic questions” (Gegenstand einer Dissertation kann jedes Problem der europäischen wie asiatischen, altamerikanischen wie afrikanischen oder polynesischen Kunst sein ebenso wie ein Thema der Volkskunde im weitesten Sinne, soweit es künstlerische Fragen umfasst). 50 Olga Schwanenfeld, Die Kunst des Pisanello und ihre Beziehungen zum Osten (Wien, Univ.-Diss., 1927). Gustave Soulier, Les influences orientales dans la peinture toscane (Paris: H. Laurens, 1924); Gilles de la Tourette, L’Orient et les peintres de Venise (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Edouard Cham-

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53

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55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

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pion, 1924). Interest in Pisanello in 1920s Britain was mainly the preserve of Adrian Stokes, who also happens to have engaged with Strzygowski’s theories. See Stephen Kite, Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye: Critical Writings on Art and Architecture (London: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2009). Marguerite Lobsiger-Dellenbach, “Mélanie Stiassny,” Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft 20 (1966), 130–135; https://www.univie.ac.at/geschichtegesichtet/m_stiassny.html (last accessed February 2016). For further details see Andrea Brandstätter, Verein der Freunde asiatischer Kunst und Kultur in Wien. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte über die Entstehung ethnologisch orientierter Ostasienforschung in Österreich in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wien, Univ.-Dipl. Arbeit 2000, unpublished). Among the invited speakers were Paul Pelliot (Paris), Stella Kramrisch (Calcutta), Oswald Síren (Stockholm), Eduard van der Heydt (Berlin), Anantha Krishna Jyer (Calcutta), Victor Goloubew (Hanoi), Chen Huan Chang (Peking) and Laurence Binyon (London), see Brandstätter, Verein der Freunde asiatischer Kunst und Kultur in Wien (cf. note 52), 102–108. The methodological rigidity that Strzygowski imposed on his institute and the extent to which he compelled his students to comply with his system has been underscored by Eva Frodl-Kraft, see Eva Frodl-Kraft, “Eine Aporie und der Versuch ihrer Deutung. Josef Strzygowski–Julius v. Schlosser,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte XLII (1989), 7–52, here 34. Arthur Wachsberger, Stilkritische Studien zur Wandmalerei Chinesisch-Turkestans (Berlin: Oesterheld, 1916). See Josef Strzygowski, “Vorwort” in: Wachsberger, Stilkritische Studien zur Wandmalerei Chinesisch-Turkestans (cf. note 55). Josef Strzygowski, Asiens bildende Kunst in Stichproben, ihr Wesen und ihre Entwicklung. Ein Versuch (Augsburg: Filser, 1930), XVI. Georg Vasold, “Riegl, Strzygowski and the Development of Art” in Towards a Science of Art History. J. J. Tikkanen and Art Historical Scholarship in Europe, ed. Johanna Vakkari (Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 2009) 102–116. Emmy Wellesz, “Buddhistische Kunst in Baktrien und Gandhara” in Kunde, Wesen, Entwicklung, ed. Josef Strzygowski (Vienna: Holzhausen, 1922), 138. On Gandhara as an eminent art-historical problem, see the recent article by Michael Falser, “The Graeco-Buddhist Style of Gandhara – a ‘Storia ideologica,’ or: How a Discourse Makes a Global History of Art,” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2011), https://doaj.org/article/72d87ea799c84911841d22083e7f78a4 (last accessed June 2016). Artur Graf Strachwitz, Der kosmische Mensch in der bildenden Kunst der Nordvölker (Wien, Univ.Diss., 1933, unpublished). Artur Graf Strachwitz, Wie es wirklich war. Erinnerungen eines Achzigjährigen (Dülmen: Laumann, 1991), 162–167. Arthur von Rosthorn, “Malerei und Kunstkritik in China,” Wiener Beiträge zur Kunst und Kultur Asiens 4 (1930), 9–26. For transdisciplinarity as a characteristic of art scholarship from a transcultural perspective, see “Understanding Transculturalism. Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna in Conversation” in Transcultural Modernisms, ed. Fahim Amir et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 22–33, esp. 27– 28. For transdisciplinary approaches in interwar Vienna, see Deborah Klimburg-Salter, “Reflections on the Contribution of Art History in Transdisciplinary Research in Vienna: The Example of the Nako Sacred Compound“ in Text, Image and Song in Transdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Deborah Klimburg-Salter, Kurt Tropper and Christian Jahoda (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 5–26. Barbara Stoller Miller, “Stella Kramrisch: A Biographical Essay” in Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 7. Even longstanding colleagues such as Ernst Diez criticised Strzygowski (albeit posthumously) for his obstinacy, see Ernst Diez, “Zur Kritik Strzygowskis,” Kunst des Orients 4 (1963), 98–109. One unusually pointed review of Strzygowski’s book Asiens Bildende Kunst in Stichproben (cf. note 57) calls the terminology outlandish and incomprehensible and then accuses Strzygowski of only ever using terms that happen to be in fashion, see “Rezension: Asiens Bildende Kunst in Stichproben,

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ihr Wesen und ihre Entwicklung. Ein Versuch,” Zeitschrift der morgenländischen Gesellschaft 84/9 (1930), 295–297.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Map “Das kunstgeographische Bild Europas am Ende des Mittelalters und die Grundlagen der Renaissance,” reproduced in: Heinrich Glück, Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 14/2 (1921/22), 163. Fig. 2: Illustration from Leopold Speneder, Die Kunst in unserer Zeit. Eine Einführung (Vienna: Reinhold, 1931), pl. XL (Mitla ruins, Oaxaca, Mexico, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1924). Fig. 3: Map “Die Kulturgemeinschaften der europäischen Völker,” reproduced in: Erwin Hanslik, Österreich als Naturforderung (Vienna: Verlag des Instituts für Kulturforschung, 1917), 42. Fig. 4a: Film still from Negerplastik (1919, directed by Hans Cürlis), © Deutsche Kinemathek, Nachlass Cürlis, 4.2.198919-0 Plastische Kunst, 2 (Yoruba Ifa Bowl, Nigeria, late 19th century). Fig. 4b: Film still from Plastische Bildwerke (1919, directed by Hans Cürlis), © Deutsche Kinemathek, Nachlass Cürlis, 4.2.198919-0 Plastische Kunst, 2, (Buli Master [workshop], ancestral figure, Kongo [Luba], 19th century). Fig. 5: “Zusammenhänge der europäischen mit der asiatischen Kunst,” page from the Austrian radio guide Radio-Wien: Illustrierte Wochenschrift der Österreichischen Radioverkehrs A. G. (RAVAG) 9/13 (23 December 1932), 15, © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Neu Per 607949D.12. Fig. 6: Front cover of the exhibition catalogue Madsimu Dsangara (Die Schatten der Vergessenen), Vienna, Künstlerbund Hagen, January/February 1934 (Vienna: Tiscus, 1934), (Yoruba Terracotta Head, Ife, Nigeria). Fig. 7: Olga Schwanenfeld, © Yad Vashem Photo Archive, item-ID 55578.

II. CONCEPTS

MICHAEL ASBURY

Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art This essay seeks to question the characteristics that have come to be celebrated as forming a specific genealogy for Brazilian art. It traces how these very same characteristics have gone from providing the diagnosis that Brazilian art was the product of a culture suffering from a seemingly incurable malaise, to one in which it is seen to be thriving and dynamic, constituting its very own genealogy not despite but precisely because of its inherent hybrid or (as I will posit) contaminated nature. I will argue that within this new understanding of Brazilian contemporary art and its specific genealogy there exists a conflation of cartography, political history, and the praxis of art that is not without its own problematics. The art critic Paulo Sergio Duarte begins his survey entitled The ’60s: Transformations of Art in Brazil by proposing a visit to an imaginary museum. This is not André Malraux’s “musée imaginaire,”1 but very much a traditional one; as Duarte himself stresses, it is one that could be located in the United States, Europe, or anywhere else in the world.2 In the first gallery of Duarte’s imaginary museum the viewer finds Oldenburg’s “huge cushioned plastic hamburger,” Warhol’s Two Elvis, Jackie Kennedy and Cans of Campbell’s Soup, Jasper Johns’ Flag, a Roy Lichtenstein comic book painting, and so forth. The second gallery contains work that Duarte considers to be “diametrically opposed manifestations” by Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Joseph Kosuth.3 For Duarte, both galleries, despite their differences, have a commonality that goes beyond the simple fact that all works were produced during the 1960s. Because these works emerged either in opposition to, or as an unfolding of, a previous moment––namely, abstract expressionism––they are considered related genealogies. Duarte’s visitor continues into a third imaginary gallery displaying works from the same period; these works are made distinct by the fact that they were produced in Brazil. The proposed visitor is a layperson who would notice certain similarities between the Brazilian works and those from the two previous galleries, yet, as if announcing the purpose of his book, Duarte also suggests, “we will see that Brazilian art of this period displays differences that lend it a character of its own, even if the layman doesn’t notice them.”4 Although these differences and similarities are not specified, they are presented as an intrinsic characteristic of the works that, unlike their North American contemporaries, are too entangled in their genealogical sources to allow for the straightforward separation or categorisation seen in the work of the previous galleries. This third space is distinct from the works in the previous rooms since it does not possess their common precedent, namely abstract expressionism, which both

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pop art and minimalism, according to Duarte, stem from and react against. Although the works in this third gallery space are similar, they are connected to another genealogy altogether; according to Duarte, this can be visually verified by the trained eye. A number of questions emerge from this statement, some productive, others less so. Firstly, the question of what is visually verifiable is problematic if we recall Jean Fisher’s accusation that A rather perverse turn of thought is required that reconceptualises cultural marginality no longer as a problem of invisibility but one of an excessive visibility of a certain order, one based in readily marketable signs of cultural difference, which is itself bound to visuality and the tendency in European thought to equate that which is visually verifiable with “truth.”5

It is perhaps this excessive visuality of a certain type to which Miguel Lopez refers in the sarcastic question that also serves as the title to his essay, “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?” 6 This leads to the second problematic that we can draw from Duarte’s statement: when it comes to conceptual art, the suggestion of something that is visually verifiable becomes, at least theoretically, difficult to discern. Kosuth’s presence within the predominantly minimalist grouping is therefore telling, as it points towards an art historical development that would lead into the 1970s and thus beyond the scope of Duarte’s book. The inclusion of Kosuth among the minimalists seems, on the one hand, to announce that the specificity of conceptual art also pertains firmly to United States genealogies, while on the other hand it points to the fact that the distinction between minimalism and conceptual art might not be so easily categorisable in itself. What is established therefore––in my opinion productively, albeit not devoid of its own problematics––is a sense of the specificity of art historical genealogies, or a form of disjunctive conjunction, if we use Peter Osborne’s definition of the expression “contemporary art.”7 That is to say, the “contemporary” can be understood as a “coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities.” For Osborne, This problematically disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward, historicist use of “contemporary” as a periodising term, in the manner in which it is encountered in the mainstream art history — for example, in its stabilisation of the distinction between modern and contemporary art.8

Of course, Osborne is not concerned in this particular case with Latin American art, but his critique of the banalisation of the category “contemporary art” and his emphasis on the 1960s as a period of transition or rupture between the temporalities of the modern and the contemporary, has a profound effect on the way in which we understand or interpret art from Latin America. For instance, the contemporary can be roughly periodised as the successor of the term modern from around 1945; a period which Osborne highlights as

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the beginning of the international hegemony of the US art institutions, and thereby of US art itself, of the incorporation of the waste products [my italics] of the pre-war avant-garde practices into museums, and the institutional advance of the so-called neo-avant-gardes.9

But the contemporary has multiple temporalities, and so Osborne invokes the following disjunction against this periodisation: Chronologically, this is the broadest periodisation of contemporary art currently in use. It is in various respects too broad, while at the same time being, in others, too narrow. Do we really inhabit the same present, art historically and art critically, as Abstract Expressionism, for example? Alternatively, is the Duchamp of the years of the First World War really so distant from us to fall outside the category of “contemporary art” altogether, as this chronological periodisation is forced to insist?10

In other words, it was in the 1960s that these two disjunctions within our understanding of the contemporary came together: the first as an origin for a geopolitically specific genealogy; the second as a radically new way in which to understand art, one whose historical spectrum is as broad as modernism itself. Osborne concludes in a manner that seems to recall already dated Latin Americanist arguments: “Such problems draw attention to the inadequacy of any merely chronological conception of time of art history.”11 If the conjunction in the contemporary is the fact of living together in time and in the present, its disjunctive nature is due to the fact that within this “now” there are several distinct and often contradictory ways of apprehending or making sense of this present. These invariably invoke trajectories in time, histories, or genealogies. It is therefore intrinsically fraught to think of Latin American art in terms of derivation, since its presence in the here and now is both conjunctive and disjunctive––in short, it is contemporary. Despite all the issues that this raises, Duarte’s claim that a genealogy specific to Brazilian art exists, contrasts quite sharply from previous considerations. Take Roberto Schwarz, for instance, whose essay “Nationalism by Elimination” suggested that such visually verifiable association with mainstream movements produced a form of malaise that arises from derivation.12 If Schwarz claimed that cultural and intellectual trends in Brazil emerged from the constant need to renew oneself in the face of the fads and fashions of the dominant culture, a cynic like myself would understand this condition of relation and separation as equivalent to that of contamination and quarantine. In fact, this proposition is not simply due to my cynicism, it is also a response to the fairly recent construction of a sense of national genealogy within Brazilian art, which we can see was already in the process of consolidation in Duarte’s text (from 1998) and has now become a fairly consensual, radical contradiction (at least superficially) of Roberto Schwarz’s argument for the Brazilian cultural malaise (originally published in Portuguese in 1986). These recent discourses fit neatly within (or perhaps justify themselves by) the famous 1928 Anthropophagite rhetoric of Oswald de Andrade, which re-emerged as a cultural referent in the mid-1960s and consolidated itself as the crux of national cultural charac-

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ter with the São Paulo Biennial of 1998. Indeed, recent interpretations of Brazilian art that emphasise the “uniqueness” of the Anthropophagite heritage tend to ignore the fact that neither Schwarz nor Duarte are actually wrong but simply complementary, since they collectively describe the disjunctive conjunction that is the basis of the cultural event or artefact within a particular moment in time. If, as Schwarz argues, the trend that is imported does not have time to develop towards its own local logical conclusion before the next trend arrives and displaces it, this process of displacement, or reaction, constitutes a specific genealogy that, as Duarte argues, ultimately informs the local art historical canon or genealogy. The problem arises when this process is taken for something that is essentially and intrinsically Brazilian. Duarte’s third gallery appears to correspond to Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as a third space that is the same but not quite the same. In this third space, according to Bhabha, the culture from which the hybrid emerges is a form of musée imaginaire where cultural diversity is created whilst difference is contained.13 Strictly speaking, Bhabha’s denomination of the third space presents characteristics between two distinct cultural or geopolitical locations, a space between the dominant and the subaltern, whose agency is not predetermined but can emerge from either of its constitutive elements. However, this positive, reconciliatory role of the hybrid is not without its critics. As Peter Hallward asserted, the properly postcolonial moment, with Bhabha, is not a time of decision or mobilisation so much as the time-lag opened up by the very enunciation and displacement of ambivalence as such, an ambivalence that relates to nothing outside the field of its articulation.14

From a cynical point of view, this deferral, or continuous strategy of overcoming which Hallward (not unlike Schwarz) accuses of never accomplishing its task, can be seen to operate within the interpretation of Brazilian contemporary art at an international level through the continuous evocation of Anthropophagy — and its legacy through Tropicalia — as a marker and guarantor of authentic Brazilianness. That is to say, the perception of Brazilian art seems stuck in a process that is said to resist but in fact only repeats the enunciation of its position of resistant, never actually transcending the condition that leads it to resist in the first place. Hybridity is by no means a new discussion, but it is one that has become implicit in the very subject — the academic discipline of the study of Latin American culture — whose specific bibliographical source can be traced back to Néstor Garcia Canclini.15 Bhabha’s ambivalence towards the term is contrasted by Canclini’s affirmative use of the notion. Rejecting the claim that modernism in Latin America did not attain the level of cultural purity present in Europe and North America due to the late or incomplete modernisation of the continent, Canclini argued that instead of replacing pre-modern culture, modernity coexists with the vernacular. Within such coexistence, the subaltern, through the process of hybridisation, opens a space of negotiation with the dominant culture while maintaining or affirming a sense of identity through the preservation of local traditions, which are in turn articulated through modernity.

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The hybrid within this understanding relies on the canon — that is, the dominant genealogies upon which an identitarian character is superimposed. It is not so much a condition of ambivalence whose agency is always deferred, but rather one where representation emerges as a form of identitarian affirmation in the face of a dominant culture. The affirmative identitarian vocation of Latin American art that Canclini celebrated seems to have subsided over the last two decades as Latin American art has become integrated as never before within the international contemporary art circuit, leading curators and critics to reformulate, satisfactorily or not, its relation to place and/or its cultural specificity. Recently, Gerardo Mosquera has argued that the shift in nomenclature from the adjective Latin American to the use of the preposition from Latin America relates to the fact that art from the region now inhabits the world stage, that it has, in other words, bridged the local to become global. He traces how it has transcended its perennial subordinate and derivative position with regard to Western canons to become a voice among many others in the cacophonous, plural and international art circuit. New artists have broken away from the marriage between art and national or regional IDs that has so much affected art in Latin America. This does not mean that there is no Latin American “look” in the work of numerous artists, or even that one cannot point to certain identifying traits of some countries or areas. The crucial distinction lies in the fact that these identities begin to manifest themselves more by their features as an artistic practice than by their use of identifying elements taken from folklore, religion, the physical environment or history. This implies the presence of the context and of culture understood in its broadest meaning, and interiorised in the very manner of constructing works or discourses.16

Mosquera, seeks to establish a form of historical progression within the hybrid condition of art from Latin America, and it is in the process of making, rather than the association of cultural references, where he sees this taking place: But it also involves a praxis of art itself, insofar as art, which establishes identifiable constants by delineating cultural typologies in the very process of making art, rather than merely accentuating cultural factors interjected into it. Thus, for instance, contemporary Brazilian art is identifiable more by the manner in which it refers to ways of making art than by the mere projection of contexts.17

The transition from a certain identifiable “look” (a representation or a projection of contexts) to a “process” (a way of making) is crucial here. If identitarian representation is denied, the persistence of differentiation is not only permitted but also necessary. This is where, for me, the terms contamination and quarantine come to mind, as they also seem to approach Hallward’s critique of postcolonialism where he suggests that the ambivalence implicit in the hybrid tends towards singularity rather than specificity. According to Hallward, A singular mode of individuation proceeds internally, through a process that creates its own medium of existence or expansion [and here Mosquera’s reference to artists

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interiorizing contexts seems coherent], whereas a specific mode operates, through the active negotiation of relations and deliberate taking of sides, choices and risks, in a domain and under constraints that are external to these takings.18

Although such an approximation deserves more thorough analysis, it does seem to resolve the paradoxical situation in which (according to Mosquera) “artists are less and less interested in showing their passports” while the discourse that legitimises their practices invariably harkens back to those same theories that asserted identity in order to overcome conditions of cultural dependency, in other words, concepts articulated through the notion of hybridity.19 Mosquera is thus still compelled to summon theories and manifestos, such as Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagy and Fernando Ortiz’s Transculturation, as well as key thinkers within the postcolonial discourse, such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, in order to purport the singularity (to use Hallward’s term) of the genealogy while seemingly denying the specificity (or the relation) that these artistic practices might have with other practices and domains. Again, from a cynical point of view, contamination is celebrated on the global field of contemporary art as long as a quarantine will keep it (the other) at a safe distance and protect us (the self ) from contamination. A paradoxical situation thus emerges where belongingness is both affirmed and denied. This contradiction lies in the fact that those theories invoked by Mosquera (and many others) belong to a historical moment when to think of an avant-garde in the periphery meant to question the implicit Eurocentrism within the ideal of universality in modern art. They are theories that belong to a modern temporality but are invoked in order to legitimise a contemporary temporality. Today, with concepts such as the avant-garde generally discredited, the rhetoric that legitimises Brazilian contemporary art, for instance within the global art circuits, invokes those same theories, as has been argued by Moacir dos Anjos, not to overcome a sense of disparity but in order to affirm a particular local accent; or as Mosquera put it, as a way of making art that differentiates itself from other ways.20 Difference as identitarian affirmation (Canclini’s model) has, it seems, been transposed onto the condition of being the same but not quite (Bhabha’s model). If we return to Paulo Sergio Duarte’s example of the third gallery, we find that although it contains work that is visually similar, these belong to a genealogy of their own, one which is simultaneously hybrid and autonomous (contaminated but quarantined). If abstract expressionism served as a point of departure for pop art and minimalism, it is in Tarsila do Amaral’s 1923 painting A Negra (fig. 1, pl. VII) that Duarte finds a predecessor for the Brazilian work of the 1960s. Tarsila’s painting, however, was a conjunction of European abstraction (purism) and the Parisian Negrophilia fad of the 1920s. As a cultural artefact, A Negra can therefore hardly be related to either Canclini’s or Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity. Translated by the painter into a signifier of Brazilianness (as Mario de Andrade claimed), A Negra appears within the Brazilian hybrid genealogy as the yet unresolved double identification with modernity (represented by the post-cubist aesthetic) and national

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Fig. 1: Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923, 100 × 81.3 cm, São Paulo, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

identity (understood by the painter herself as essentially primitive). There is a crucial distinction here between double identification and double consciousness: the first projects the hybrid onto the other; the second interiorises the hybrid as a problematic condition of the self.21 There is, in other words, a critical distinction between the representation of the other and self-representation; Tarsila’s A Negra fits into the former rather than the latter definition. This distinction, which is hardly ever acknowledged, is also a key aspect within the hybrid genealogy of Brazilian art. Tarsila’s A Negra is in this sense a projection of identities other than her own, since it presented European abstraction as the backdrop for the figure of the Brazilian, represented by a naked black woman. Nature (in the shape of a banana leaf ) separates foreground from background. The painting thus stands as a hybrid prototype, one which — though its constitutive parts are not yet resolved or synthesised — already presents a problem that would find its brilliant resolution five years later in Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago,” which identified cultural cannibalism as the unavoidable Brazilian condition. A fundamental change indeed occurred in the transition of Tarsila’s painting from prototype to synthesis: in 1928, the black woman (the figure of the wet nurse painted by the wealthy daughter of coffee oligarchs) was transformed into the painting Abaporu (fig. 2), in which the artist invoked a mythical Brazilian pre-Cabralian native.22 Tarsila’s passage from the Pau Brasil to the Antropofagia phase of her work, substitutes an unconscious allegory of the economic foundation (the legacy of slavery) of Brazil (which ultimately provided the material conditions for her own existence as a cosmopolitan artist living in Paris) with another allegory,

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Fig. 2: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928, 85 × 72 cm, Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini

one that revived the Indianist fad of the late nineteenth-century Brazilian academic romantic painters when the native (then already virtually exterminated by the driving forces of modernity) came to represent the nation. In Tarsila’s 1929 painting Antropofagia (fig. 3), both these allegories stand — or more precisely, sit — side by side as if emphasising the transition and confirming Oswald de Andrade’s proclamation: We are all Anthropophagists! But who is Oswald addressing? If Tarsila’s Antropofagia is anything to go by, one might suppose that Oswald’s “we” is directed precisely at those who are absent from the painting, namely the third constitutive, formative ethnicity of the Brazilian people, the white of European descent––in other words, the painting’s viewer. Hybridity is a problematic characteristic with which to form the basis of a genealogy, but not because of any claim of purity in cultural production, authenticity, origin, and so forth, since the driving force of any cultural production lies precisely in its interaction with or contamination by other sources. Hybridity is problematic as a means of identification not because of what it enunciates or what it makes visible but because of what it conceals. If the native became symbolic of the nation during the second half of the nineteenth century, for the modernists it was the mulato or mulata who came to symbolise the Brazilian people. At first this seems to be an honest gaze upon the national ethnic composition. However, the representation of the mulato conceals as much or perhaps more than it makes visible. Let us consider another type of hybridity, one that, unsurprisingly, is less often celebrated. Modesto Brocos’ painting entitled The Redemption of Ham (1895, fig. 4) associates the biblical curse of Ham with blackness of skin by depicting a black grandmother who thanks god for her white grandchild.23 Her mixed-race daughter holds the baby while her white son-in-law looks on at the scene with an air of pride.

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Fig. 3: Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia, 1929, 79 × 101 cm, São Paulo, Fundação José e Paulina Nemirovsky

Fig. 4: Modesto Brocos, The Redemption of Ham (A Redenção de Cam), 1895, 199 × 166 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Museo Nacional de Belas Artes

Although the son-in-law’s expression might simply reflect the natural pride of fatherhood, it may also be read, perhaps more in line with the painting’s “message,” as the satisfaction brought about by the fruit of his redemptive blood, which was seen as a means of cleansing the nation of its dark — or quite literally, black — past. Given the date of the painting (1895), it is fair to assume that the grandmother would have been only recently freed from slavery (abolished in 1888). The presence of the father, the poor European migrant rural worker, is significant in associating the nation’s redemption with the policy of whitening the population through miscegenation. This was one of the key debates of the time. It con-

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nected the abolitionist movement with both the foundation of the republic and the political struggle exercised by the oligarchic land-owning families. The latter adhered to it in order to maintain their power base throughout the political and economic transition from the monarchy to the republic (declared in 1889) and from slave to paid labour. Within this politico-economic shift, abolitionism in Brazil did not necessarily disentangle the “reconciliation” ideology of Christian belief from the racism that had served to justify slavery. Instead, it drew on the late nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific notion of eugenics, which was devised in Britain by Francis Galton who “adapted” the theories of his cousin Charles Darwin in order to associate physiological (and by extension, ethnic) traits with personality characteristics. The eugenic discourse served abolitionist aims by introducing waged labour as a modernising substitute for slavery. This particular form of modernisation became interesting to the land-owning oligarchic elite who eventually saw economic as well as political benefits in the transition, thus guaranteeing their position of power within the newly established republic. Racist as it is, Brocos’ painting nevertheless presents, or represents, hybridity as a fact, one that was inextricably connected with the positivist ideal of the nation’s drive towards modernity. The mulato therefore is not only a product of the ideological modernising drive of the nation (that equated the whiteness of skin with civilisation), the mulato is the actual driving force of the modernity of the nation, the hybrid symbol of the economic transition between sugar cane slave labour and immigrant man power in coffee and beyond. It was only natural that the modernists chose to represent their own aesthetic hybridity through his/her image, but this is not without problems and contradictions, as we can see in Tarsila’s A Negra. The hybrid therefore is not so much foreclosed by the political (Bhabha’s ambivalence) but determined by the agency of the elite’s politics towards modernity: a discourse that is at the very core of the postcolonial rhetoric. To proclaim hybridity as the overarching characteristic of the genealogy of art in Brazil, or anywhere else for that matter, is to participate in the construction of an art history based on a myth that reduces culture to the “visually verifiable” while ignoring the possibility of a conjunction of practices and ideas that possess distinct (or disjunctive) genealogies. It is, in other words, to defer the malaise of derivation by quarantine rather than to diagnose and reveal the symptoms. For those of us who research art and culture from Latin America, our defensiveness towards our subject and our willingness to celebrate, which conceals an inability to be critical and to reveal its more problematic characteristics, seems to me to be the core of the ailment.

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Notes 1 André Malraux, Le musée imaginaire (Geneva: Skira, 1947). 2 Paulo Sergio Duarte, The ’60s: Transformations of Art in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Campos Gerais, 1998). 3 Ibid., 13. 4 Ibid., 14. 5 Jean Fisher, “Some Thoughts on Contamination” in Vampire in the Text: Narratives of Contemporary Art, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Iniva, 1995), 252–257, here 254. 6 Miguel Lopez, “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?,” Afterall 23 (Spring 2010), http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.23/how.do.we.know.what.latin.american. conceptualism.looks.likemiguela.lopez (last accessed 10 February 2015). 7 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013). 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Ibid., 18. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Roberto Schwarz, “Nationalism by Elimination” in Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas, trans. and ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 1–18. 13 Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 207–221. 14 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2001), xii. 15 Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995). 16 Gerardo Mosquera, “Against Latin American Art” in Contemporary Art in Latin America, ed. Phoebe Adler, Tom Howells and Nikolaos Kotsopoulos (London: Black Dog, 2010),12–25, here 22. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial (cf. note 14), xii. 19 Mosquera, “Against Latin American Art” (cf. note 16), 22. 20 Moacir dos Anjos, Contraditório: Panorama da Arte Brasileira (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna, 2007). 21 Double consciousness was a concept developed by W.E.B. du Bois as a way of describing the Afro-American consciousness of inhabiting two cultural worlds at the same time. 22 Pre-Cabralian refers to Pedro Alvarez Cabral, the Portuguese Naval officer who “discovered” Brazil. 23 Genesis 9:25 describes the curse of Ham as that of being condemned to be the “servant of servants,” leading to the original assumption that the passage justified the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites. Later interpretations, with the intention of justifying slavery, identified the curse with the blackness of skin.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923, oil on canvas, 100 × 81.3 cm, São Paulo, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (reproduced from: Art d’Amérique Latine 1911–1968, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994, 103). Fig. 2: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928, oil on canvas, 85 × 72 cm, Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini (reproduced from: Jorge Schwartz, ed., Brasil 1920–1950: De la Antropofagia a Brasilia, Valéncia: IVAM centre, 2001, 67). Fig. 3: Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia, 1929, oil on canvas, 79 × 101 cm, São Paulo, Fundação José e Paulina Nemirovsky (reproduced from: Mostra do redescobrimento: Arte moderna, São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2000, 93).

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Fig. 4: Modesto Brocos, The Redemption of Ham (A Redenção de Cam), 1895, oil on canvas, 199 × 166 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Museo Nacional de Belas Artes (reproduced from: Acervo: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro: MnBA, 2002, 80).

MELANIE KLEIN

Modes of Creation Art Teaching in South Africa and Uganda between Theory and Practice Experimental Articulations: Transcultural Relationships in Educational Venues Art educational encounters and venues in South Africa and Uganda from the 1930s onwards have taken place in the utterly transcultural spheres of mission schools, informal art workshops, or private tutorship and art schools. Here, new and already existing modes of artistic creation emerging from different cultural backgrounds, and directions of thought have been embraced, dismissed, negotiated, and transformed. Nevertheless, the intellectual baggage carried into educational situations by students and teachers of African origin is largely unexplored. This can in part be explained by the fact that first, archival material, such as interviews or the art critical utterance of earlier African cultural workers and artists, is rare or lost; and second, the generation of an art historical canon––mainly conducted by academics of European origin––has laid emphasis on the development of categories and on well-defined historical episodes, which have complicated endeavours to sketch diverse voices and approaches. Up to the present day, art education in Africa has been mostly associated with the legacy of European teachers, or those with a European migration background, who implemented European concepts into their syllabi. It is often overlooked that these imported concepts were never set in stone and were always highly assailable. Pedagogical principles and concomitant aesthetic notions of “authentic,” “original,” or typically “African” art production were constantly changing and were adjusted in particular venues. They were, furthermore, very much dependent on the individual tutor and already carried a history of contradictory and ambivalent meaning before arriving at educational institutions in Africa.1 Art education was not only executed in mission schools, subsequent art schools, or in workshops, it also took the form of informal mentorship or collaboration. To get along within the jungle of theories, convictions, pedagogical tentativeness, and failure I will trace the path taken by particular agents, and examine their journeys and networks. I will explore which frameworks made these movements and the formation of educational networks possible. Both political dimensions and material disposability played a major part in negotiating the spaces of artistic freedom. Art education in particular was an experiment that was shaped by numerous factors. One of these elements was the conflicting mindset of European teachers and African students in the face of questions

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about how to deal with aesthetic heritage, economic necessity, and the demand of the art market, as well as political constraints. However, in contrast to restrictive guidelines in politics that in South Africa, for example, culminated in the 1953 Bantu Education Act, the art educational environment appeared as a rather intricate and relational discursive scope. In art schools and workshops, students and teachers alike were influenced by interaction, experience, and expectations. Sidney Kasfir and Till Förster define the workshop as “a social space in which individuals cooperate. […] it is a sphere in which interpretive processes unfold.”2 I would like to add that this interpretive aspect was also accompanied by educational efforts that unfolded as various experimental agendas. This investigation of art educational frameworks in South Africa and Uganda by means of a transcultural perspective seeks to increase understanding of the complexity and impact of differing voices, differing strategies of teaching, mentoring, and learning as well as the extremely diverse deployment of emerging concepts that accompany the constitution of new art forms, namely the “authentic,” the “African,” or particular regional genres.3 Integrating a transcultural perspective into the survey of certain venues facilitates an approach that takes into account the transformations of such concepts as well as the asymmetrical forms of agency in institutions. Here, misunderstandings and deviant meanings as well as the precariousness of both material and intellectual avenues abound. In South Africa, for example, art historical enquiries offer an extensive understanding of the works and lives of black artists, ranging from early writings on rock art to Edward J. de Jager’s first book on Contemporary African Art in South Africa in 1973, Steven Sack’s seminal exhibition on The Neglected Tradition in 1988, and Elza Miles’ various biographical essays, to mention only a few. Yet connecting these biographies with other cultural agents, such as teachers, gallery owners, or curators, and thus investigating the intersection of theories and practices on a transcultural level is a conducive complement and continuation of the general endeavour to redirect art historical narratives and a means to expose mythologizing tendencies.4 After all, as art historian Monica Juneja notes, such encounters between different agents indicate neither the evidence of homogenizing effects, nor of “incommensurable differences.”5 In this article, I will trace four cultural agents in order to highlight what I have described as a transcultural angle on art educational venues: the South African artist, teacher, and entrepreneur John Koenakeefe Mohl and his student Helen Mmakgabo Sebidi; South African artist and founder of the Ndaleni Art Centre in KwaZulu-Natal, John Watt Grossert; and Margaret Trowell who — originally from England — established the Makerere Art School in Uganda in 1937.

Struggling Agents: Educational Itineraries in Various Frameworks The juxtaposition of case studies from South Africa and Uganda provides an exemplary impression of the thoroughly different developments and pedagogical solutions applied in these regions, but it also underscores the similarities of discourses

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and practice in some of the most prominent and important art educational venues in the ambit of the British colonies and protectorates at that time. These developments were dependent on individual backgrounds, local situations, economic structures, and alliances as well as on specific political formations. As a settler colony, South Africa had launched a considerable amount of mission schools as well as government schools compared to other regions on the continent.6 In Uganda, today’s Makerere University was expanded from a technical school in the early 1920s to the establishment of the University of East Africa in 1963 and formed the centre for the African elite and petty bourgeoisie within this period. In both areas, art education for Africans — initially in the form of teacher training — became one of a number of educational options, albeit in various manifestations. Especially from the 1920s to the 1950s, the British government and its officials were engaged in controlling and generating education in their territories. This continued right up to the apex of independent movements, which occurred from the late 1950s onwards7 and until the election victory of the Nasionale Party in South Africa in 1948, which aggravated the segregation of various population groups that had already been introduced in the early twentieth century. In both South Africa and Uganda, “British policy was long content to develop education that provided no prospect for power, satisfying a goal to ‘civilise’ without breaking with segregation and combining missionary action with government action.”8 At the same time, it was “successful at satisfying the African demand for secondary education, whether in their settlement colonies, and despite the racial segregation associated with this settlement, or in their extractive colonies.”9 Beyond the dichotomy of “Western” education and “African” adaption, and despite the similarity of accordant underlying structures in British colonies, art educational venues were completely heterogeneous breeding grounds for modes of creation.10

John Koenakeefe Mohl and the White Studio John Koenakeefe Motlhakangna, later Mohl,11 was one of the first South African art teachers of African origin. When he opened a modest art school––the White Studio––at his home in Sophiatown, Mohl had to operate within a societal framework that usually provided art educational programmes for black students in the mission school context only and solely as an additional qualification for teachers. Sophiatown was a culturally vibrant, multi-ethnic, but also difficult environment right up to the moment when it was demolished and its inhabitants forcefully removed after 1955. Although residents were allowed to own land––an unusual privilege in urban areas especially for black people––for most, Sophiatown was a place of grinding economic hardship (fig. 1, pl. VIIIa). When Mohl opened his educational venue in 1944, for example, an average monthly wage accounted for approximately fifteen rand in comparison to a poverty line of then twenty-five rand.12 However, through his education at the Tiger Kloof Training College, a highly respected educational establishment in his native area of Bechuanaland,13 as well as

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Fig. 1: John Koenakeefe Mohl, Snow morning, Sophiatown, 1942, 45.6 × 59.8 cm, private collection

his residencies in Namibia and Germany, Mohl belonged to an ambitious black middle-class that claimed equal rights “for all civilized men.”14 Mohl developed several possibilities with which to earn his livelihood. He generated different channels of distribution for his artworks, and with the White Studio eventually established a space for communicating and producing art that was supposed to serve as a marker of the cultural equality of all ethnic groups. Understanding Mohl’s position as an art teacher is only possible indirectly through his former student Helen Sebidi. In an interview I conducted with her in 2012, she portrayed Mohl as a sensitive and disciplined man for whom an art career was not simply an issue of inborn talent––often ascribed to African artists in his time––but rather the result of hard work and commitment.15 In the five pages of biographical notes bequeathed by Mohl, and which form the sole personal evidence of his views on his own career, he states that the sale of his paintings was an essential justification of his life as an artist as well as of his extensive education. Mohl was not Sebidi’s first teacher. Her grandmother, a traditional mural painter, taught her about the “development of creative capacities.”16 Her diligent attitude towards her work and her self-confident pursuit of an art career must have been rooted in Sebidi’s rural upbringing. In the early 1970s, Mohl supported Sebidi as her primary artistic mentor, and he advised her to go back to her birthplace to se-

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Fig. 2: Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, Untitled (Man and woman walking), 1969, 30 × 24.8 cm, property of the artist

riously engage with her traditional background. Mohl’s guidance, however, had nothing to do with reinstating anachronistic aesthetic idioms or with the search for pristine living conditions that could be reproduced in accordant images. It was rather a reaction to Sebidi’s “invented” traditions of romanticized rural scenes, which she had painted in Johannesburg before they met.17 In this respect, Mohl proved to be an excellent and far-sighted teacher who was interested in researching African history and culture and recommended that Sebidi “recognise herself ”18 and thus “develop an individual idiom.”19 Sebidi’s artistic output underwent several different stages. It must have been difficult to resist the demands of an art market that was dominated by South African buyers of European origin who were looking for the visual narratives that Sebidi had initially offered. She also told me that some buyers even asked for pictures in the “Mohlian” style (fig. 2, pl. VIIIb).20 When Mohl was her tutor she in fact worked in a similar mode. However, in the following years, Sebidi developed her own distinctive style, notably in the 1980s while continuing her education at the Katlehong and Alexandra Art Centres and at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. Here, she further framed an understanding of authenticity that was based on a sophisticated acknowledgement of artistic individuality as well as a combination of the intellectual security enabled by her spiritual home and modernist ideas. Precognitive art processes, for example, which were discussed and promoted in the urban art workshops that Sebidi attended, can already be located in her childhood. These modes of creation were procured by the elders in her hometown through “reading the clouds.”21 It seems as if “traditional” concepts were only assisted by new approaches and translated into an innovative artistic production (fig. 3, pl. IX). Furthermore, an authentic artistic enunciation was per-

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Fig. 3: Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, In the strong wind near South Africa, 1983, 114 × 85 cm, private collection

ceived as a form of art that would upset “the expectation that black South African artists do a certain kind of township art […].”22 It was thus emplaced in contrast to these expectations, not in compliance with them. John Mohl was an exception when it came to networking and intellectual exchange. He was, of course, in contact with other leading artists of his time such as Gerard Sekoto, whom he advised to stay in South Africa and pass his experience on to his fellow citizens instead of exiling to Paris.23 Yet he also seemed to be a maverick in his pragmatic attitude towards producing commissioned art and following his interest in impressionistic language and social commentary. One of his fundamental concerns, though, was to educate. The curator and art educator Steven Sack even goes so far as to consider Mohl the only artist of African origin who directly influenced a significant part of South African art production.24 His personal educational mandate was to paint one’s own people and to thus not lose the “true source of inspiration.”25

John Watt Grossert and the Ndaleni Art School Notwithstanding Mohl’s exceptional position as a teacher and artist, educators of European origin were the ones who usually administered the far-reaching networks to facilitate exchange ideas and staff. Equipped with theories that were rooted in Germany and Austria and in the late nineteenth-century art education movement

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as part of the so-called Reformpädagogik, European teachers operated along similar methodological matrices, though often with different agendas. The movement’s aim was to educate society comprehensively through art, music, and literature, and it targeted the establishment of an integral human being as opposed to focusing on an individual’s alienation through the disrupting tendencies of industrialization. John Watt Grossert and Margaret Trowell seem to have been alike in their educational approaches. Both appreciated art as a civilizing factor, and both believed in its ability to enhance everyday life and to improve a society’s aesthetic sensibility. In reference to the African context, both were aware of the damaging impact of colonialism and the possible erosion of cultural practices. Their theoretical writings reveal a highly ambivalent and provisional idea about how to convey art-making processes to African pupils and students. I use them as examples because they were the first protagonists to implement institutionalized art curricula into already existing educational venues. With the term “institutionalization” I refer, in this case, to an entirely European organizational structure and not to the long existent practices of imparting creative skills in Africa. The analysis of such structures self-evidently entails the affirmation of political as well as ideological frameworks. Nevertheless, I will focus here on Grossert and Trowell’s engagement with “art for life’s sake”26 and their related viewpoints. John Grossert founded the Ndaleni Art School in 1951 at a teacher training college that used to be a mission school. The art centre not only provided a place for teachers to complete advanced training, it also became a breeding ground for later artists or those teachers who wanted to pursue an art career in addition to their regular bread-winning jobs. A specialization in art and craft also involved an increase in salary and a higher professional status. In the 1950s, the art course27 at Ndaleni was one of the very few opportunities for art training of citizens of African origin in South Africa and included subjects such as art history, painting, crafts, and design. Ndaleni was a multicultural venue accommodating students from Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, and Namibia. It would have been futile in this context to ever allude to a “typical” African art production. Grossert, who was then appointed Organizer of Arts and Crafts and Industrial Work for the native schools in Natal, instead tried to realize the development of an art appreciative African middle class. Through art, he believed it was possible to establish an inclusive society in which each and every person could reach the same civilizing level. Before implementing an educational schedule though, Grossert and his colleague Ann Harrison, later Robinson, a graduate from the Slade School of Art in London, visited the Middleburg Training College to get an idea about how art training might look. The art historian Juliette Leeb-du Toit writes about this encounter: “[…] the Ndaleni task team was astounded at [the student’s] absorption of [W]estern art methods and the subsequent nature of their art. After their extended visit both Grossert and Harrison felt justified in introducing pictorial art and [W]estern art training as an alternative or adjunct to craft and industrial training in African schools.”28 Consequently, instead of distinguishing between South Africans of African and European descent, Grossert elaborated on the discrimination between educated and unedu-

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cated people. Furthermore, he did not understand culture as a property that belonged to certain groups exclusively but rather as an archive that everybody should learn and could be creatively foraged. In his view, cultural heritage had to be seen from a global perspective. Grossert seemed to anticipate Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of the cosmopolitan who points beyond those links between objects and human beings that are mediated through collective identity exclusively. “The connection through a local identity,” Appiah writes, “is as imaginary as the connection through humanity. […] but to say this isn’t to pronounce either of them unreal. They are among the realest connections that we have.”29 The crucial problem is that in the South African context, Grossert’s intellectual gesture encountered a framework that provided only fragments of that very archive selected and presented, moreover, by individual teachers. The very first art educator at Ndaleni, Ann Harrison, came to South Africa as a young art graduate with very limited experience teaching but with the strong conviction that “Art should be as important as learning to read and write”30 and with an ambition to impart artistic creativity to every single student. Before a regular art curriculum was even developed at Ndaleni, Harrison brought teaching methods from the Bauhaus art school in Germany, which formed part of the progressive education movement. However, when John Grossert finally offered her the opportunity to establish a three-year art course for specialist art teachers, she recoiled from taking up the responsibility: “Something about Art History will have to be taught, but what? Surely not the usual focus on European Art. A study of African art would be interesting, but equally limiting. Something is needed that would be of real value for the students.”31 The teachers that continued art education and developed regular classes at Ndaleni after Harrison left addressed exactly this issue. The school’s newsletter and subsequent magazine Arttra, which was initially inaugurated to establish a discursive network for former students, reveals what was communicated from that very cultural archive. At times, it also included descriptions of South African ethnic groups.32 In general, students were constantly reminded of working on their technical skills, of the importance of creative “authenticity,” in the sense of individual expression rather than ethnic idioms, as well as of achieving high artistic standards. Art history books were scarce at the beginning of the art course; however, art historical topics were randomly introduced in the magazine by students.33 At least by the 1970s, the library at Ndaleni seemed to have acquired a considerable number of art books. As Chippa Mtjali reports: “We have different kind of art books that are heavy-loaded with rich reproductions which in turn leads to our own originals. […] I can proudly say that it is an up-to-standard art library.”34 In other words, books that did not always represent state of the art knowledge but were nevertheless considered important for the future art teachers’ work, such as art educator Viktor Löwenfeld’s Your Child and His Art. A Guide for Parents in 1973, were briefly reviewed. Grossert turned explicitly away from the political policies in South Africa that aimed at separate laws from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and instead advocated the educating efforts of missions. The African intellectual had to achieve

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equal status and to take responsibility.35 However, this status, according to Grossert, could only develop next to European culture, not within it. He emphasized the concept of originality as an inclusionary instrument: as long as artists produced original artworks they could be included in the art world, regardless of the aesthetic quality of their objects. Clearly, originality was valued more by Grossert than conventional aesthetic properties. With this approach he embraced into the canon of art all man-made objects, but at the same time he relied on the exclusive structures of originality to justify them. “It would be unreasonable […] to exclude any work of man from our category of art,” he wrote in his 1968 book Art Education and Zulu Crafts, “unless it is merely a copy or repetition of a skill.”36 It becomes clear that the dedicated art mentor conceded the potential for original art making, and thus the activation of a modernizing process, to every individual. However, his approach was derived from an entirely European vantage point. Repetition and copy in this context were not discerned as multi-layered cultural values, nor as a necessary phase in studying art, but were seen rather as the trait of an illiterate man. The modern notion of originality was transferred to a context that was perceived to be potentially equal, yet was also expected to keep ready its genuine “African” characteristics. The cachet of emotionality in the “authentic” artistic production by African artists was a leitmotif in Grossert’s considerations. “The art of the rising artists among the Bantu of South Africa,” he continued, differs from both the old traditional styles and also from the contemporary art of whites in this country, Europe and America, since in its upsurgence it shows a profound interest in humanity and the portrayal of the full range of man’s emotions. This humanistic trend at a time when the art of the white races has shown a tendency towards becoming more abstract and dehumanised, evinces a commendable independence in the Bantu and also their ability to strike new roots to provide supports in the place of the traditional ones which have been cut away.37

In this section of his text Grossert exhibits one of the real differences between his contemplations and those of other European art teachers. Grossert was genuinely interested in providing a concept of art that could reconcile one’s own emotions with an unsettled, that is to say, racially segregated society. Preserving ethnic traditions was no longer an issue beyond the belief in fundamental cultural differences.

Margaret Trowell and the Makerere Art School Margaret Trowell, in contrast, concerned herself seriously with the question of protecting traditional craft. However, her compendium African Arts and Crafts from 1937––intended to educate educators––displays a more differentiated approach. First of all, she acknowledges the fact that teachers of European origin know next to nothing about art from Africa. She states, “those who are most concerned in the teaching of art to Africans are most emphatic that we should realise our entire ignorance, otherwise we shall simply impose rules of what we think African art ought

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to be.”38 The involvement of African craftsmen in educational programmes was thus one of her first suggestions. Trowell founded the Makerere Art School in Kampala, Uganda as an informal gathering of artists in her house. As in later art schools in the region, she was mainly interested in educating art teachers and from 1940 onwards offered suitable additional courses. Trowell’s position obtained official status, with payment to match, only in 1947. In 1949 the art school was connected to the Makerere Institute of Education and provided a three-year teacher training course. And in 1954, the department gained the status of an autonomous art school and it was allowed to grant an art diploma. Trowell’s strict distinction between craft and art formed a complex theorization of art education. Whereas the production process of craft was embedded in an elaborated framework of religious meaning, daily needs, economic potentials, and the rather pragmatic idea of eventually introducing European techniques and new forms, the establishment of modern art, notably in the form of painting, was described by her as an experimental journey of uncertain end. In a similar way to Grossert, Trowell favoured art making that was culturally distinguishable. But unlike him she offered a concrete teaching method that––in her view––would produce exactly that distinction. “It seems to me important,” she pondered, “that the African should realise from the first that what is expected from him is not a poor imitation of the English type of picture which he will see in his school books or in the house of the missionary or teacher, but something which is really African and his own.”39 The method she suggested bears a resemblance to the precognitive processes in art making that were developed in the context of South African art venues in the 1980s and that Helen Sebidi used to deepen her creative skills. However, the two approaches must not be confused. While Trowell was promoting the ability to conjure up an inner imagery through the associative storytelling of the educator, Sebidi worked “with no image or story in mind,”40 reflecting instead “authentic subjectivity.”41 The latter method resisted any stereotypical visual narrations, whereas the first often advanced them. In his dissertation on two generations of Makerere artists in Uganda, the art historian Sunanda Sanyal summarizes Trowell’s ambiguous stance: On the one hand, Trowell encouraged her students to be individual and original in their pictorial expressions, and therefore, like the Modernists of her generation, she rejected the legacy of empirical observation for a dependence on the mind’s eye. On the other hand, because she disapproved of the formal experiments that characterized much of modern art, she remained faithful to narrative as an indispensable artistic tool.42

In further examining Trowell’s text her position becomes even more incommensurate. African creation was indeed accepted as equal to other aesthetic sensations, but her evolutionist perspective still denied Africans an equal historical position. This article can only provide a cursory glance at the complicated and polyvocal climate in art educational institutions at the time. However, it should have become clear that it is not possible to explicitly attribute theoretical and methodological

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ideas along ethnic parameters. As Sanyal rightly suggests, we should avoid the assumption of a “homogenous ‘colonial mentality’”43 and instead think of art schools and workshops as venues of negotiation and agency as well as places of material and intellectual scarcity. It is also worth remembering that the Ndaleni Art School and the Makerere Art School, like most other venues of higher education, were spaces in which students from various cultural backgrounds came together.44 The assumption of a consistent artistic idiom thus fails from the outset. Instead, certain concepts were perceived differently, sometimes even antithetically, and were used to develop theoretical and artistic structures that sought to surmount cultural prejudices with more or less successful results. The approaches used to teach art in an African context ranged from the equation of indigenous people with children––especially in Trowell’s thoughts, which recall the records of the British educator Marion Richardson45––to the sophisticated interweaving of traditional creative modes with new methods. In specific societal frameworks, art schools and educational endeavours can be perceived as ships and shallops manoeuvring through stormy political tides, venturing precarious turns, and anchoring at different conceptual harbours.

Conclusion Although the transcultural perspective I have outlined here advances an investigation of art educational venues as spaces of relational processes of art production, it is important to question the circumjacent frameworks that work into these spaces. Only then it is possible to reveal constrictions and liberties and to map the possibilities of artistic agency. If John Grossert, for example, suggested a commonly available archive, one has to ask if and how this archive could be adequately mediated and what kind of artworks emerged from this educational intervention. Although he himself did not teach, Grossert’s universalistic thoughts were moulded into very particular educational approaches and ultimately into specific art forms in conjunction with concrete material as well as cultural facts. Leeb-du Toit suggests that “[p]erhaps one needs to explore the idea that an African aesthetic, that traversed the different cultural groups present at Ndaleni, had begun to emerge through general consensus.”46 Yet beyond that, it has been shown that the emergence of “African” aesthetics and its respective fictions in different venues formed different conceptualizations referring, among other things, to an assumption about the unsettling forces of modernity, to individual expressiveness, and to the creation of “real African” artworks. In his essay “Poetics of Relation,” Édouard Glissant remarks that the identity of colonizers was “exported as a value” during the course of the travels and conquests of dominantly Western peoples.47 This is certainly true for the educational and artistic concepts that shaped art production in Africa. Opposition to these processes, he continues, would have been “a limitation from the beginning.”48 To go beyond this limitation would imply the “thought of errantry”49 that accentuates the relational aspect of identity formation. Art educational venues

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seem to have abetted this errant stance, for any agent acting within them experienced contradictory and polyvocal configurations of that very space. With Glissant acknowledging the actuality of the sometimes difficult power constellations and the contingent “shock of relating,”50 I nevertheless discern in art schools and workshops venues in which the conflicting search for artistic and cultural identity came along with an errant movement between theory and practice. They provided, as I would like to suggest, spaces of genuine artistic experimentation that lay somewhere between the rejection and the formation of fictions of African creation.

Notes 1 Since the subjectification of taste starting with Dominique Bouhours’ treatise on The Art of Criticism at the end of the seventeenth century and Jean-Baptiste Dubos’ Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture from 1719, the concept of authenticity has undergone several theorizations and modifications, upturns and crises, in aesthetic and cultural discourse. Referring to aesthetic authenticity as the justification for art’s autonomy and self-evidence, for example, Eberhard Ostermann identifies a theoretical apex in early romanticism. In his book Die Authentizität des Ästhetischen, Ostermann historically investigates ideas about how art can be described as authentic beyond external ascriptions, categorizations, and representational tasks or even burdens. The definition of aesthetic authenticity thus shifts between art’s autonomy and its realization in specific historical frameworks. The category of originality, however, became aesthetically relevant with the idea of the creative genius in the eighteenth century and culminated into a rampant self-articulation of the artist and thus the embodiment of an inner constitution. See Eberhard Ostermann, Die Authentizität des Ästhetischen. Studien zur ästhetischen Transformation und Rhetorik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 100 and 103. In the following decades and centuries, both concepts were consistently connected to or demarcated from each other, and their definition ranged from addressing objects and their effects on recipients to the expressiveness and later optimization of the (creative) self. 2 Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2013), 12. 3 Monica Juneja, for example, describes transculturality in art historical investigations as a methodological engagement with relational processes between cultural domains, that is, with a constitutive retroactivity provoked by concrete agents and through their respective mobility and relationships. For Wolfgang Welsch cultural differences can thus be transformed and eventually revitalized and even strengthened. In a transcultural society there would no longer be any “separatist differences,” but only commonly available differences in constant transformation. See Wolfgang Welsch, “Was ist eigentlich Transkulturalität” in Hochschule als transkultureller Raum. Kultur, Bildung und Differenz in der Universität, ed. Lucyna Darowksa, Thomas Lüttenberg, and Claudia Machold (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 39−66, here 61. 4 In her essay on the South African artist, art historian Anitra Nettleton gives an example of such art historical myths that claim Feni’s “African” greatness in reference mainly to his identity and supposed mentality. Nettleton instead locates Dumile Feni, especially his later work, within a wider framework of twentieth-century modernism and its concomitant concepts. See Anitra Nettleton, “Writing Artists into History: Dumile Feni and the South African Canon,” African Arts 44/1 (2011), 8−24. 5 Monica Juneja, “Kunstgeschichte und kulturelle Differenz. Eine Einleitung,” Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 40 (2012), 6–12, here 10. 6 The economist Denis Cogneau, for example, draws a direct connection between European settlement and the quantity of education. See Denis Cogneau, Colonisation, School and Development in Africa: An Empirical Analysis (Paris: DIAL. Développement, institutions & mondialisation, 2003).

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7 See, for example, Clive Whitehead, “The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire,” History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society 4 (2005), 441−454, here 441. 8 Cogneau, Colonisation, School and Development in Africa (cf. note 6), 20. 9 Ibid., 28. 10 Lewis Nkosi, among others, offers a similar diagnosis for African universities as educational sites of struggle rather than homogeneous impositions of Western layout. See Lewis Nkosi, “The Birth of the African University” in Words and Worlds: African Writing, Theatre, and Society: A Commemorative Publication in Honour of Eckhard Breitinger, ed. Susan Arndt and Katrin Berndt (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007), 31−44. 11 Mohl adjusted his name or rather “Westernized” it during his stay in Germany. Nevertheless, his last wife, the late Puseletso Mohl, as well as his son Jerry, still use this family name. 12 South African History Online, “A Culture of Survival” in sahistory.org, http://www.sahistory.org. za/topic/culture-survival (last accessed 25 April 2016). 13 Especially under the direction of Reverend Arthur J. Haile, from 1915 onwards the school became the leading centre of education for Botswana people, who demanded an appropriate education for their children as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Seretse Khama, for example, the first president of Botswana and the grandson of King Kgosi Tshekedi Khama––friend and mentor of John Mohl––studied here in the late 1930s. 14 Emile Maurice, “Art, Heritage and a Posse of Pioneers” in Messages and Meaning: The MTN Art Collection, ed. Philippa Hobbs (Johannesburg: MTN Foundation, 2006), 48−67, here 55. 15 Helen Sebidi in an interview with the author, 19 March 2012. 16 Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi (Parkwood: David Krut Publishing, 2009), 91. 17 Sebidi recalls Mohl’s suggestion that her individual mode of creation could only evolve from an examination of her cultural background and eventually of her inner constitution. He suggested a combination of listening carefully to the stories of elderly people who had stayed in the area of Sebidi’s birth and an attentive study of artistic techniques (interview with Helen Sebidi, 8 March 2012). 18 Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi (cf. note 16), 41. 19 Ibid., 35. 20 Helen Sebidi in an interview with the author, 19 March 2012. 21 Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi (cf. note 16), 71. 22 David Koloane quoted in Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi (cf. note 16), 51. 23 Helen Sebidi in an interview with the author, 19 March 2012. 24 Steven Sack, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930−1988) (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1988), 13. 25 Joe Dolby, “Gerard Sekoto” in Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, ed. Hayden Proud (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2006), 104−111, here 104. 26 Elsbeth Court, “Margaret Trowell and the Development of Art Education in East Africa,” Art Education 38/6 (1985), 35−41, here 35. 27 The Indaleni Art and Craft Teachers’ Course was officially inaugurated in 1951 (draft of an article for the magazine Bantu by John Grossert from ca. 1955 in the Killie Campbell Africana Library and Archives). 28 Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School: A Retrospective (Pietermaritzburg: Tatham Art Gallery, 1999), 9. 29 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006), 135. 30 Ann Robinson, What is this Thing Called Art (Cheshire: unpublished manuscript, undated), 11. 31 Ibid., 89. 32 See Peter Bell et al., eds., Arttra. Being a Bulletin for Art Teachers (Ndaleni: Ndaleni Art School, 1961−1980), and especially Solomon Sedibane in Arttra (1962) or Marcus Lebethe in Arttra (1967). 33 See, inter alia, articles on Abu Simbel in Arttra (1966), but especially the volumes on art history and vocabulary in 1975 and 1976, which were produced on the occasion of the integration of elementary art theory into the syllabus of art education in South Africa.

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34 See Bell, Arttra (cf. note 32), 1972. 35 “Within the context of the South African politics of knowledge, control of African education was taken out of the hands of ‘amateurs,’ that is, missionaries and an emerging black elite, and given over to white, state ‘professionals’ or ‘experts’,” writes Brahm Fleisch in relation to a new educational policy after the election victory of the National Party in 1948. See Brahm Fleisch, “State Formation and the Origins of Bantu Education” in The History of Education Under Apartheid 1948−1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened, ed. Peter Kallaway (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 39−52, here 39. A commission under the chairmanship of Werner W. M. Eiselen that was responsible for the constitutive Eiselen Report especially addressed the problem of the so-called intellectual proletariat, or black educated people that would never be able to fully participate in South African society in a way that was adequate to their schooling. See Cynthia Kros, “W. W. M. Eiselen: Architect of Apartheid Education” in The History of Education Under Apartheid 1948−1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened, ed. Peter Kallaway (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 53−73, here 61. Nevertheless, Eiselen disallowed theories based on racial classification and discrimination and instead aimed at reconciling mission-bred intellectuals with their communities. In this sense, “‘Bantu’ was held to allude to a cultural (or social) environment that predisposed its subjects to learn in particular ways and from which they should not be alienated. The ‘unhappy’ condition of many African intellectuals was explained by the fact that mission education had alienated them from their cultural roots” (66−67). Yet this theoretical framework — primarily operating with conceptualizations of efficiency and social planning — slowly turned, inter alia, into an ideology of preserving “authentic” ethnic “traditions,” which found its way into the art educational realm. 36 John Watt Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Crafts: A Critical Review of the Development of Art and Crafts Education in Bantu Schools in Natal with Particular Reference to the Period 1948−1962 (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1968), 27. 37 Ibid., 42−43. 38 Margaret Trowell, African Arts and Crafts: Their Development in the School (London: Longmans Green, 1937), 22−23. 39 Ibid., 51. 40 Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi (cf. note 16), 57. 41 Ibid., 64. 42 Sunanda Sanyal, Imaging Art, Making History: Two Generations of Makerere Artists (Atlanta: Emory Univ., 2000), 87. 43 Ibid., 72. 44 Ibrahim Noor, for example, writes in the 1960s: “The very diversity of the traditional backgrounds from which the students of the [Makerere] School of Fine Art come, makes it absurd to expect any one line of development to emerge.” See Ibrahim Noor, “Art in Africa –Backwards and Forwards,” Transition 27 (1966), 39−41, here 40. And the art historian George Kyeyune states that the art school in Makerere was a diverse “meeting ground for African ethnic communities” in the 1930s. See George Kyeyune, Art in Uganda in the 20th Century (London: Univ. of London, 2003), 41. 45 The so-called child study movement of the late nineteenth century laid the foundations for the subsequently popular connection between childhood development and evolutionary theory. The “general psychonomic law claims that the child passes through a series of developmental stages that correspond to the stages the human race passed through in its progression from savagery to civilization. … Tribal arts were seen as primitive, like the art of children, and not surprisingly, child art was often compared with tribal art,” a view that was also supported by Viktor Löwenfeld. See Arthur Efland, A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 160. In 1939 Löwenfeld wrote: “It is obvious that there is a close relationship between the drawings of children and those of primitive and even archaic art …” See Viktor Löwenfeld, The Nature of Creative Activity. Experimental and Comparative Studies of Visual and Non-Visual Sources of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture by Means of the Artistic Products of Weak Sighted and Blind Subjects and of the Art of Different Epochs and Cultures (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 8. Löwenfeld’s writings on The Nature of Creative Activity were also employed at Ndaleni, their theories mediated by teachers such as Peter Atkins.

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It might be this encounter with Atkins at Ndaleni that brought South African artist and academic Selbourne Charlton Sobizwa ‘Selby’ Mvusi to actually study with Löwenfeld at the Pennsylvania State University from 1957 to 1959. Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School (cf. note 28), 19. Édouard Glissant, “Poetics of Relation” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 71−78, here 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid. Ibid., 78.

Illustrations Fig. 1: John Koenakeefe Mohl, Snow morning, Sophiatown, 1942, oil on canvas on plywood, 45.6 × 59.8 cm, private collection. Fig. 2: Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, Untitled (Man and woman walking), 1969, oil on board, 30 × 24.8 cm, property of the artist (reproduced from: Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, Parkwood: David Krut Publishing, 2009, 15). Fig. 3: Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, In the strong wind near South Africa, 1983, pastel on paper, 114 × 85 cm, private collection (reproduced from: Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, Parkwood: David Krut Publishing, 2009, 60).

TOBIAS WENDL

Fictions, Fakes, and Authenticities A Survey of Artistic Practices from Africa and the Diaspora* In his essay “Qui a inventé les Africains?” (Who Invented Africans), published in 2002, Hassan Musa coined the term “Art-Africanism.” It refers to modernist art productions in Africa that reflect and affirm market expectations of “Africanness” and “African authenticity in the West.”1 Initiated and supported by Western mentors and patrons, a neo-primitivist space of projection was entwined in the form of workshops, exhibitions, collections, and catalogues that negotiated and perpetuated cultural difference. Musa’s concept of “Art-Africanism” serves as a starting point from which to consider how artists position themselves in this context. Some are able to successfully affirm their “Africanness” and use the expectation of cultural difference as a creative resource. Others strategically switch between an “African” and “post-ethnic” or “global” identity. Still others operate “artistic fakes” and “fictional projects” which they use to question the notions of originality and authenticity that are generated from the outside. Both concepts — originality as well as authenticity — are European constructs from the eighteenth century that carry their own trajectories and connotations.2 In Greek, the adjective authentikos, at least initially, meant “genuine” in the sense of “perceived as original” — a quality that was closely related to the culture of writing and bureaucracy and was primarily used in printed records. However, semantics has since extended far beyond the notion of “original” to include credibility, sincerity, and being true to oneself, especially in relation to the work of Rousseau and Herder on the ethics of modern subjects.3 I start here with the premise that authenticity and originality are not intrinsic qualities of objects or artworks but attributes that are carried over from outside. They blend aesthetic and ethical perspectives and judgments with one another and assume, as “travelling concepts,”4 different concretions with locale-specific discursive frameworks. Even if the authentic appears to possess a certain surplus value (Mehrwert) in relation to the original, the emphasis in Western art history, with its linear narrative organized according to stylistic epochs, more strongly emphasizes the notion of originality, while the question of authenticity is more likely to be dealt with in the field of non-European art (African art in particular).

African Art, Art-Africanism, and Ethnic Marketing Art production in Africa was just as excluded from the Western discourse on originality in the nineteenth century as it was from the genealogy of epochs and styles

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postulated by art history. Its aesthetic appraisal followed the established evolutionary model in which African sculpture was understood as an expression of an archaic human will to form (Kunstwollen). As a construct, “African art” (first “art nègre,” “primitive,” “tribal” or “traditional” art, and finally as “art premier” or “classical African art”) was shaped during the first thrust of globalization around 1900 and was received — at least partially — in the colonial “world art discourse” that emerged almost simultaneously.5 Leo Frobenius, Eckard von Sydow, and Carl Kjersmeier6 sought to identify so-called style provinces, which resulted in the anonymization of the individual artist and solidified the characteristic colonial paradigm of “one tribe-one style.” This “othering” topos reflects Hegel’s denial and inversion of the autonomy of the individual in Africa in favour of the ahistorical, cult-embedded collective of a “tribe.” This primitive formation was conceived of as the antithesis of European enlightened high culture and therefore condemned to be erased. Artefacts from Africa could only count as original works of art if they were produced before the alleged entry into colonial historicity and were — above all — not produced for the art market. As a result, the use-patina of objects, which until now is both the most highly valued and the most frequently forged in the art trade, has advanced to a quasi “ethnic signature” or a “biological imprint of the original.” Here it was not the name of the master that became the fetish of the art market,7 but rather the tribal label. Although this understanding of art and culture, together with the ideologies that it is based upon, has been frequently criticized,8 it nonetheless continues to dominate the presentations of the historical arts of Africa (for instance in the new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris). However, modern and contemporary art have, of course, long since taken their place alongside historical African art. Firstly, these art forms were acquired and adopted by diasporic artists in Europe within the context of their studies abroad; secondly, modern formats, techniques, and procedures were carried to Africa during the Workshop Movement of the 1950s and brought to life by European patrons: Pierre Romain Défossés and his painting school in Lubumbashi; Susanne Wenger, Ulli and Georgina Beier in Oshogbo; Frank McEwen in Salisbury (present day Harare); and of course Léopold Sédar Senghor and Pierre Lods in Dakar.9 It was in these historical contact zones that the Art-Africanism that Hassan Musa speaks of was established. Interestingly, Musa’s cited patrons not only include the usual suspects, including Beiers, McEwens, Lods, or Magnins, but also the likes of Soyinka or Enwezor. For instance, Josephine Baker is the protagonist in Musa’s version of Susanna and the Elders; instead of the elders who ogle her, we read the names of the most important actors in the field of “Art-Africanism.” Multi-national oil concerns like Shell and Esso are also listed here (fig. 1). With this work Hassan Musa asks: “What justifies the existence of a contemporary art that calls itself ‘African’? Who profits from the existence of such a category?” And he compares mega exhibitions like Africa Remix (2004–2008) with the indigenous villages as they were presented in colonial exhibitions.10 From a similar perspective, the Nigerian artist and art historian Olu Oguibe describes the field of contemporary art — intensively globalized since the 1990s — as

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Fig. 1: Hassan Musa, Suzanne et les vieillards, 2007, Galerie Pascal Polar, Brussels

a “culture game.” This game provides so-called ethnic slots that allow non-European artists to temporarily participate as long as they satisfy the Western appetite for cultural difference.11 In his study L’art de la friche, the French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle has explored the production of discourses and the practices of exhibiting African art (“tribal” as well as contemporary) as a mirror in which he tries to map the paradoxical place of Africa in the Western imagination. His book probes a critical and at times ironic ethnography of the West in its slowly changing attitude towards Africa. Drawing on Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime (as the antidote to the beautiful) with its power to compel and to overwhelm, Amselle identifies Africa as an ongoing and privileged object for arousing “delicious fright” in Westerners. He identifies two basic layers in the perception of Africa: “Africa as a degenerate continent,” doomed by corruption, tribalism, poverty, and AIDS on the one hand; and “Africa as a source of regeneration and artistic refreshment” on the other. Both layers are like flip sides of the same coin and both dispose of long trajectories. The emotional (over-)investment in the idea of regeneration results from a European self-perception as a sterilized, anaemic, aging, and spiritually weakened continent in need of rejuvenation. The regeneration aspect was a leitmotiv in the rise of all sorts of avant-garde primitivisms and subsequent neo-primitivisms during the twentieth century (from Pablo Picasso, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud to Jean-Hubert Martin and André Magnin) and it continues to play a crucial role in contemporary cultural politics and artistic joint ventures in the domain of “Art-Africanism.”12 A 2004 exhibition in Geneva curated by Tirdad Zolghadr and Martine Anderfuhren titled Ethnic Marketing examined the conspicuous xenophilia within the contemporary art scene. The exhibition critically examined concepts that had almost turned into formulaic terms, such as “platform,” “forum,” or “bridge,” and

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implicitly perpetuated the idea that art continues to be part and parcel of a larger socio-cultural context.13 In this world of carefully staged inter- and transcultural encounters, one’s capacity for “ethnic marketing” plays a crucial role. How and with what position can artists in the jungle of stereotypes and ethnic slots generate and performatively substantiate a convincing image of themselves? The Beninois artist Romuald Hazoumè, winner of the Arnold Bode Prize at documenta 12 (Kassel, 2007), may serve as an example here. One of his first solo exhibits in Paris in 1994 bore the evocative title Je sais d’où je viens (I Know Where I Come From). Hazoumè first garnered success for the masks made of found scraps and plastic that he began to produce in the 1980s. They were sculptural experiments that he described as “masques bidon.” His well-known dictum about this is: “People expect Africans to make masks. So I make masks!”14 A critical impetus lurks behind his seemingly ironic statement: “I make new masks with the rubbish people send to us from Europe, and I send them back to galleries with my culture inside them.”15 On the occasion of the exhibition New Art from Africa at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 1996, the journalist Gabriele Riedle wrote about Hazoumè: “In a mixture of sarcasm, melancholy, and a deeply serious care for tradition, he transforms the waste of first world civilisation to quasi-original African tribal folklore: plastic bottles, canisters, records, and irons are recycled into masks.”16 When Hazoumè travels to Europe for exhibitions and conferences he always appears in a long, flowing Boubou, often with a headpiece, which unmistakably identifies him as African. Part of his “ethnic marketing” is also that he rejects the (Western) term “artist” and instead uses the term “Are” from the Yoruba language. The term describes mobile woodcarvers, but also other cultural producers like poets and musicians who travelled between the courts of Yoruba Kings and presented their arts before the changing public there. Hazoumè expands this notion by articulating the role of the “modern Are” as not only a wanderer, but also as a mediator between Africa and Europe.17 He has also repeatedly pointed out that he can trace his lineage back to a “Babalawo,” a priest of the Ifa oracle. Through this act of legitimation, he not only emphasizes the authenticity of his own cultural roots, but at the same time empowers himself to take up the sacred knowledge associated with the oracle and further utilize it within the framework of his own artistic practice.18 Hazoumè testifies his respect for the oracle by not signing his paintings: “I can no longer allow myself to place myself alongside these symbols.”19 After his commercially less successful detour into painting, Hazoumé once again returned to his canisters in the early 2000s. He photographed motorcycle couriers who transport up to 300 litres of smuggled gas from Nigeria in plastic canisters. The primarily young drivers, who live in economically precarious conditions, risk accident — or their wares exploding — for a pittance; they play roulette à la béninoise (fig. 2). However, Hazoumè does not limit himself to contemporary forms of economic exploitation and political malfunction. He also makes connections to the transatlantic slave trade and to recent labour migration from Africa to Europe.20 La bouche du roi is both his best known and his most complex work. The title La bouche du roi — in English “the mouth of the king” — refers to the mouth of the

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Fig. 2: Romuald Hazoumè, Roulette béninoise, 2004, October Gallery, London

River Mono that was a loading port during the slave trade. The work is a kind of “lieu de mémoire” and at the same time a commentary on the inhumanity of the slave economy on which modern Europe and America are built. Hazoumè uses 340 black gas canister masks for the work that represents the human cargo on the infamous Brookes of 1778. The well-known abolitionists’ floor plan, in which one can make out the densely packed groups of slaves on deck, also served as a model. But unlike the slave traders, for whom the slaves were simply anonymous and dehumanized cargo, Hazoumè gives each of his person-masks an individual identity through simple decoration like feathers, pearls, or small talismans (fig. 3). The first version of the work was created in 1999 and was then adapted in 2007 for the British Museum in London on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain in 1807.21 The boat motif also appeared in documenta 12 in Kassel during the same year as Hazoumè’s British Museum exhibition. The installation was titled Dream and also consisted of gas canisters — but this time in the style of a contemporary pirogue, like the ones that migrants use for their illegal passages between Africa and Europe. The boat stands in front of a kind of photo-wallpaper containing an idyllic beach scene. The message seems to be that although life here on the coast of Benin could be wonderful, because of economic hardship and political reprisals the people are compelled to leave their homeland and make their way north, where everything appears to be so much easier and better! Hazoumè, however, has his own dream: to stay at home. The work was recog-

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Fig. 3: Romuald Hazoumè, La bouche du roi, 1997–2005, Collection of the British Museum

nized in Kassel with the Arnold Bode Prize 2007 and was subsequently purchased by the Neue Galerie in Kassel. Romauld Hazoumè has created a number of noteworthy objects and installations in the last two decades and has demonstrated a refined sensitivity for contemporary topics and discourse. Furthermore, he has understood, perhaps more than any other African artist, how to perform his own authenticity and to sustainably satisfy the Western appetite for the sublime. On the occasion of the Bode Prize Award, the German news magazine Stern, for instance, titled their report on Hazoumè: “King’s son fights against slavery.”22

Fictional Art Projects and Artistic Fakes The presentation and staging of fictitious entities and events has had a long history in art and literature, especially in the service of social self-reflection and critique. The genre of fictional travelogues such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from 1719 and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters from 1721 are examples, as is George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, which was published in 1949. Similar phenomena have also been established in the field of art. The best known is surely Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal that the artist signed with the fictitious name R. Mutt and submitted to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 at the New York Grand Central Palace. The Duchampian readymades were gestures of appropriation that initially irritated the art world’s originality discourse, but affirmed it in the long-term. Fictitious artists like Hank Herron,23 Nat Tate,24 or Georg Paul Tormann25 appeared later and were thought to be real until their fictional character was uncovered. The same is true of the countless art projects about fictitious firms, products, labels, currencies, and states.26 It is admittedly not easy to make a clear distinction between fictional art projects and artistic fakes, but as a general rule, “forgeries” and “artistic fakes” differentiate in that “forgeries” attempt to attain the status of an original (one thinks of art forg-

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ers such as Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, or Wolfgang Beltracchi). Even when their creations don’t forge existing works, they fraudulently claim the status of the original through the forged signature. Artistic fakes, on the other hand, don’t conceal their true authors, but rather question our notions about originality and authenticity. Sherry Levine’s photo series After Walker Evens or Elaine Sturtevant’s “repetitions” of famous artworks by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol serve as good examples of this, examples which render a sharp delineation between “appropriation art” and “artistic fakes” nearly impossible. Stefan Römer pleads for a semantic shift of the concept in his book Artistic Strategies of the Fake: A Critique of the Original and the Forgery. In it he writes: “With fake a term is conceived that, contrary to its conventional use in English, includes the strategy to make its own double status visible, to simultaneously correspond to both the category of the original artwork as well as the forgery.”27 I suggest using the term “artistic fake” only if it’s part of the artistic strategy to at least temporarily withhold the art project’s fictional character from the audience so they do not know that they are dealing with an art project. With fictional art projects, on the other hand, the artistic character isn’t concealed, and its reception is carried out with the full knowledge of its fictionality. But the difference between the two remains blurry because many projects oscillate between them: often one part of the public is privy while the other isn’t, or the project’s fictional character gradually comes to light over the course of the project. One often-cited early example of this is Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds for the radio play series “Mercury Theatre on the Air.” Staged as reportage, the 1938 broadcast induced widespread panic on the east coast of the United States. During the exhibition Africa 95 in London, Kendell Geers presented a work titled By All Means Necessary. It consisted of a sheet of paper with eight paragraphs placed on the wall next to an empty white cube. The text read as a warning to the viewer: “A bomb has been hidden somewhere within this exhibition, set to explode at a time known only to the artist alone.” Although the artist apologized in advance for all damages and any possible physical harm, he evaded responsibility with the statement: “I have no choice, being as much a victim of the course of art history and contemporary politics as those who are hurt in the process.” From this point of view, both artist and audience are victims of a sinister alliance between art history and politics!28 Geers’ fictitious bomb seems to have been aimed at the “white cube” as a symbol of the hegemonic assimilation of non-Western art through the elimination of its primary religious, social, and performative contexts. Geers’ photo performance Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from 1993 (fig. 4) shows us a light-skinned man wearing a latex Nelson Mandela mask.29 The title refers to James Joyce’s book by the same name, but it also evokes Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks — or rather its inversion. The image’s protagonist wears a camouflage army jacket and combat boots and comfortably sits at a flea market stand with replicas of African masks. His get-up evokes the members of the right-nationalistic “Afrikaner Resistance Movement.” The year is 1993 — a decisive moment in South Africa’s transition. De Klerk’s reform politics were encountering

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Fig. 4: Kendell Geers, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1993

Fig. 5: David Hammons, Blizz-aard-Ball-Sale, performance, New York 1983 (photograph: Dawoud Bey)

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Fig. 6: Fred Wilson, Bag Sales, performance in front of the US-American pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2003

increasing resistance from conservative white South Africans; at the same time, the conflict had intensified between Mandela and the ANC on one side and Buthelezi and the INCATHA on the other. Our flea market vendor appears to be preparing himself through his masking for a violent future in South Africa. But there is also a subtext here about the commodification of African Art. African masks and sculptures, which at the beginning of the twentieth century had a tremendous impact on Western modernism and subsequently found their way into museums, now appear, at the end of the twentieth century, as cheap reproductions that are artificially aged in order to deceive and be sold as souvenirs in the tourist market. Geers’ photo-performance Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also relates to earlier works by other artists such as David Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale (fig. 5), which tackles the commodity character of art and the role of the artist as a salesperson. In 1983, Hammons stationed himself on a Manhattan street and laid out a set of snowballs for sale on a rug. The artist performed the role of a street vendor, offering passersby wares that — because of their ephemeral nature — were highly dubious. Begging the question: Could art be something similarly dubious? In any case, like the Senegalese vendors and their counterfeit Prada, Gucci, or Louis Vuitton handbags in Italy, Hammons looks ready to roll up his rug and flee at any moment.30 Fred Wilson took up this motif of the street vendor by devising a form of “meta-fake” performance recorded in his exhibition at the American Pavilion of the 50th Venice Biennale, Speak of Me as I Am. On the opening day he posted an African tourist in front of the pavilion to masquerade as a Senegalese vendor and offer neatly laid out handbags for sale on a white cloth. Biennale visitors began to complain and notified the security personnel (fig. 6). As the carabinieri took the alleged street vendor into custody, Wilson intervened and revealed that he had hired the salesmen and that the bags weren’t fakes, but designed and produced by the artist himself. “The guy took it in very good spirit,” Wilson remembers, “but it took the police and the audience a little while to understand that it was art.”31 What is significant about this move is that it wasn’t the handbags that were faked, but the sales situation itself, which the audience did not initially recognize.

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Fig. 7: Barthélémy Toguo, Transit 1, 1996, performance

Barthélémy Toguo carried out similar artistic interventions in his eight-part performance series Transit (fig. 7). In the first piece the artist used three rough and naively cut wooden suitcases that resemble tribal art objects and that the artist checked in at the airport of the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé. The clearly fictitious luggage astonished fellow passengers at the baggage claim in Paris’s Roissy airport. Shortly thereafter the security and customs patrol arrived on the scene. Suspecting a trick behind the artist’s provocation, they confiscated the bags and undertook a scrupulous two-hour inspection using x-rays, flashlights, and scanners.32 One difference between Transit and Fred Wilson’s work is that the intervention here didn’t take place in an art setting, but rather in a day-to-day situation. Nonetheless, the random audience of bystanders in both cases didn’t recognize that they were witness to an art performance. For the work Transit 6, Toguo, dressed in a French street sweeper uniform, boarded a first class TGV from Cologne to Paris. Alongside the photo (fig. 8) there is a diary entry on a text panel in which Toguo writes: On January 18, 1999 in Cologne, I board the TGV-Thalys high-speed train to Paris. I am wearing a City of Paris dustman’s uniform — a brand new one. I am sitting on seat 84 in coach 27 in the middle of the coach, where four people can sit and face each other. Seats 82, 83 and 85 are occupied. Mine is free — so I sit down. Within a few minutes, my neighbors leave their seats to sit further away. One hour later, near Aixla-Chapelle, an inspector arrives and says: ‘Sir, you are not allowed to travel in this uniform.’ Surprised, I ask him why and whether there is an appropriate outfit to wear on the Thalys? My ticket is in order and I am sitting calmly, but clearly, my dustman’s suit is incompatible with the Thalys businessmen’s wear. After talking for several minutes, the inspector tells me that I am making people uneasy and asks me to get off at Aix-la-Chapelle. Had the occupants of seats 82, 83 and 85 complained? Did they get up because of my outfit? Because I am a dustman? The inspector declares that, once in Brussels, security guards and the police will deal with me. He takes out his phone and walks away, so I can’t hear the conversation. I can’t tell if he is phoning Brussels,

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Fig. 8: Barthélémy Toguo, Transit 6, 1999, performance

but I do hear him say that I am refusing to get off. Of course, nobody came on at Brussels station and I didn’t see the inspector again. Thus I finished the journey alone, with no interruption, in a practically empty coach 27.33

The experience of transit and the everyday exclusion associated with it — whether as a black man or a worker — as well as the subtle negotiations of temporary spaces is at the centre of Toguo’s performances, which encompass “faked” situations entirely aimed at holding a mirror to his actual surroundings as well as the art audience. At the beginning of the 1990s, the white South African painter, object and performance artist Beezy Bailey invented — “in response to political correctness where artists are chosen on their skin colour in an attempt to re-write our sad history” — an alter-ego in the form of a fictitious black artist named Joyce Ntobe. He organized several gallery exhibitions of her work and submitted a series of linocuts at the 1992 Cape Town Biennial that corresponded to all of the stereotypes of township art. Joyce’s works were promptly purchased by the National Gallery.34 As Bailey subsequently disclosed his “fake” action, a heated debate ensued about the continuation of racist selection criteria in the South African art world.35 In South Africa, the first fictional art projects had already taken place during the time of apartheid (1948–1992). Walter Battiss, co-founder of the New Group in Cape Town (1938)

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Fig. 9: Walter Battiss, Fook Waste Bag, depicting Fook king Ferd the 3rd aka Walter Battiss, not dated, 30.5 × 17.5 cm

and later a professor for fine arts at the University of South Africa in Pretoria founded the Fook Island Project in 1973, a fictitious group of islands for which he successively created objects and iconography in collaboration with Norman Catherine: flags, sceptre, stamps, maps, passports, drivers licenses, its own currency, newspaper (the Fook Nooksspaker), soccer jerseys, and yes, even its own alphabet. One of the Fook history books published by the artists portrays the settlement of the island in 1723 by King Ferdinand. His descendent Ferd III, the present ruler, is depicted with the countenance of Walter Battiss (fig. 9). The phonetic similarity between Fook, folk, and fake was intentional. In addition to Norman Catherine (Norman King Norman), members of the Fook Island Project were Walter Saunders (Wabiti Walter), the art historian Esmé Berman, as well as the gallery owner Linda Givon (Queen Linda the Only); the British pop artist and later-curator of the mega-exhibition Africa: Art of a Continent (London, 1995), Tom Phillips, contributed labels for Fook wine bottles. There were also performative elements in the form of happenings, including the conferral of Fook prizes with speeches by Battiss, and Fook musical acts, as well as Fook food served at exhibition openings. In November 1975, a Fook delegation rode through inner-city Johannesburg in a convertible wearing Fook costumes and strew flowers among the passersby.36 As an

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open, participatory, and arbitrarily expandable project, the Fook Islands constitute a utopia within the historic context of the South African apartheid state, in which — as Deborah Lee Lutrin rightly emphasizes — the primitivist impetus of Battiss’s visual vocabulary remains clearly discernible.37 Under the title I’ll stop believing in you, if you stop believing in me, Ruth Sacks and Robert Sloon produced a 2005 exhibition catalogue for an exhibition that didn’t actually take place and included real works by real artists as well as fictitious works by fictitious artists. The project can initially be read as a parody of the brand-name supporting operating system of contemporary art, but equally as a strategy to create a counter publicity from the peripheral art world position of South Africa. In doing so, it takes up a curatorial strategy that had already proven itself in the context of American conceptual art. In 1969, Seth Siegelaub circulated a catalogue for an equally fictitious exhibition entitled July, August, September 1969 with works by eleven artists (among them Daniel Buren, Sol Lewitt, and Lawrence Weiner). Both catalogue covers feature a world map.38 What differentiates the project by the South African art activists Sacks and Sloom from the earlier US-American project is that, on the one hand, not all of the artists were real (or at least not credited by their own names) and, on the other, the catalogue has still yet to be printed. Due to a lack of funds, only a small number of limited-edition preview copies exist. In April 2010, the esteemed Johannesburg Art Gallery opened an exhibition by William Kentridge titled America Made in China. The artist Roelien Brink was behind the project, and managed, despite the red tape, to officially change her name to William Kentridge. The name change was part of her project, which concerned itself with the branding strategies of American consumer culture and its parallels with the celebrity cult of the art market.39 In an interview with Michael Smith for the online platform Artthrob the artist spoke about her role models and compared her approach with Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns: I think the method is similar, but the concept is rather different. Duchamp used the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. In a similar way I am using the name William Kentridge. I am using the name because it is familiar, not because I want to comment on Kentridge or his art. Both Johns and Duchamp used other people’s work. They changed it and claimed it to be their own, therefore questioning issues such as identity, originality as well as authenticity. I guess I am doing that in a similar way by applying it to issues today, both in art and general society. These issues include such things as branding, instant fame, power, money, status and wealth.40

After this performance, however, Roelien Brink abandoned the name Kentridge, and she has since returned to working under her earlier name. The recent boom in fictitious artists and artist alter egos is not limited to South Africa alone. In Angola, the performance and media-artist Nástio Mosquito composed a manifesto in which he presented his female alter ego Nástia to the public. This artistic figure placed Nástio Mosquito’s earlier values into question and proposed a radically different lifestyle: “hypocritical,” “ironic,” and “do not give a fuck!” We learn about Nástio’s death and about why he had to die: his humanitar-

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ian values and the belief in his homeland Angola was ultimately not successful; now he must be replaced by “Nástia,” for whom consumption and success are more important than communication and social concern. In Nàstia’s manifesto, the “son of the cold war” shows himself to be bitterly disappointed by the neo-liberal, postwar reality in Angola and formulates seventeen maxims or paragraphs for a new artist ethos in the age of boundless capitalism, which has, of course, long since seized the art world in Angola.41 The Kenyan-born, British-educated, United States-based artist Allan deSouza created an artistic alter ego named X.Man. X.Man is known for his photo collages — which he calls “drawls” — that often deal with sensitive topics, such as racism in US-American popular culture, and themes that deSouza himself would rather avoid. The monkey Why appears as the protagonist in X.Man’s collages, embodying the cliché of a foreign, outsider, and deviant and simultaneously referring to the trickster figure of the signifying monkey in African American folklore. X.Man acknowledges the limits of his artistic practice when he asks: “Is it possible to parody a racist image without perpetuating its racism?”42 Alongside his artist alter ego, deSouza also created a fictitious art historian named Dr. Moi Tsien, who took part in international conferences like “New Geographies in Contemporary African Art” at Harvard University in 2008. The programme listed him as “Moi Tsien, Ad Minister, Ministry of Round Holes, Berlin.”43 The differences between the alter ego as a fictional art project and the art historian as an artistic fake are clear here. In 2003, the Franco-Algerian artist Kader Attia founded a fictitious grocery and clothing brand named Hallal (the Arabic word for “pure”). In the corresponding art projects he explored questions of authenticity and purity from a diasporic perspective against the backdrop of consumerism, religion, and youth culture. His starting point was the Parisian public housing suburb Sarcelles — a banlieue predominantly characterized by Muslim and Jewish immigrants from North Africa in which Attia himself grew up. The expression “Sarcellite” in French is a pejorative ethno-synonym for the inhabitants of the suburban ghettos with its anonymous housing blocks, social rejection, burning cars, and high rate of youth unemployment. In his installation Machine à rêve (Dream Machine) from 2003, Attia presents a bright red vending machine for food, drinks, and other Hallal items. A lifelike dummy stands in front of the machine wearing an equally red hoodie that flaunts the Hallal logo in both French and Arabic script. The vending machine is stocked with kosher food and other pure products such as “Gin-Hallal,” “kosher powdered soup,” an American passport, a gold credit card, and a handbook to learn Verlan — the slang used by youth in the banlieue. The display of products in the Dream Machine thus become a mirror of the desires for authenticity and purity that appear here as compensation for the missing connections to their mother countries. Kader Attia emphasizes the pressure to conform and the lack of choices within the youth culture of the banlieue: “Either you run after the consumer goods that everyone wants to have — or you become — if you don’t manage that, a follower of a religion (Judaism or Islam). You’re either a member of a gang, whose

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Fig. 10: Kader Attia, Machine à rêve, installation, Venice Biennale, 2003

codes you follow — or you seek salvation in religious practices that are already mostly obsolete in North Africa.”44 The Dream Machine discloses a contact zone, draped with fictitious consumer goods, between youth ghetto culture in the banlieue and an asymmetrically unfolding globalization. At the same time, it also provides the necessary elements needed to cobble together new identities using multiple reference systems.45 Four versions of Dream Machine were produced altogether. Alongside the prototype depicted here was another version containing Muslim devotional objects, one with fictitious prestige objects, and one with weapons. In 2004, Kader Attia registered the brand Hallal in the French register of commerce and opened a boutique on rue Mazzarine in the posh Latin Quarter for Hallal streetwear: jeans, pullovers, t-shirts, baseball caps, and headscarves that featured the lettering (fig. 10). Graffiti by some sinister-looking men — also in Hallal clothing in front of a typical dreary apartment block — was in resplendent display on the back wall of the boutique. Galerie Kamel Mennour was complicit in this art action — the boutique moved into their space. The lack of understanding was immense and after the first press reports appeared, worried business owners in the district raised massive protests to prevent the establishment of a cheap label geared towards youth from the banlieue. Fig. 11 shows a view of the boutique and demonstrates that for outsiders the art project wasn’t easy to recognize as such; indeed, the young clientele targeted for Hallal streetwear began to pursue the clothing so quickly that the artist and his colleagues had difficulties replenishing supplies.46

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Fig. 11: Kader Attia, Boutique Hallal at Galerie Kamel Mennour, interior view, Paris, 2004

Kader Attia’s Hallal projects thematize the triad of brand consumption, religion, and youth culture in the French banlieues. Consumption and religion are equally suspect to Attia: consumption as a replacement for religion and religion as the last refuge for all who are excluded from consumption. The original meaning of “hallal” in the sense of pure (or Muslim dietary restrictions) has certainly been expanded. The word is also used in youth slang today in the rather secular sense of “suitable,” “consistent,” “right,” or “correct.” Attia distinctively also writes “Hallal” with a double “l” — while the correct spelling uses only one. A fictitious pan-African currency named “Afro” was presented at the biennial for contemporary African art Dak’Art in 2002. The project was initiated by the Berlin-based Senegalese artist El Haji Mansour Ciss Kanakassy and is part of his Laboratoire Déberlinisation.47 The logo for this “labor of de-Berlinization” consists of an elongated Brandenburg Gate blended with the contours of the African continent. The artist takes the Congo Conference in Berlin in 1885, at which the African continent was divided up among European states into colonies, as his starting point, and he understands his project as a part of the resistance against the continuing economic and cultural exploitation and oppression of the continent. After the euphoric response that the project received — both in Dakar as well as the subsequent presentations in 2003 in Vienna and Sacrow (a town close to Berlin), the

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Fig. 12: Mansour Ciss, 100 Afro Note, 2004 (Second Edition), 14 × 6.5 cm

laboratory released further series of the “Afro” at the Dakar biennials of 2004 and 2008. As can be seen in figure 12, the new bills propagate the codes of a utopian, prosperous Africa equipped with an international transport system for the circulation of goods and commodities. The bills were brought into circulation through the installation of a teller booth at a fictitious African bank. And in the corresponding performances, the public took part by conducting their Afro-banking services here. A few years ago Mansour Ciss received a scholarship from China where he continued to work on the Afro. At the moment he is preparing the shipping of Afro-Express cards, which contain the silhouette of the jackal-headed ancient Egyptian god of death rites, Anubis; one can already order the cards on the Internet. Furthermore, the launch of Afro ATM machines is planned, and prototypes have already been ordered in China. Since the Afro-notes stored in the Afro-bank are artworks, they are numbered and have a limited edition of 1000. Meanwhile, another product from the current Afro-line has been issued by the Laboratoire Déberlinisation, a check-card sized global passport — a “travel document for all humanity regardless of origin.” Telephone cards from a future African mobile network provider are also in the works, as are wax prints of Afro notes. The Afro-Project is like the process of decolonization, which Mansour Ciss understands as Déberlinisation, an open-ended and ultimately interminable “work in progress.” It consists of interventions, artist alliances, and performances; a continually expanding set of bank notes from temporary exchange offices, advertisement posters, record covers, check cards, ATM machines; and last but not least, a proliferating body of texts that riffs on the genre of artist manifestos as much as the NGO-rhetoric of development politics, which is partially documented on his website. These texts, which superficially frame and explain individual aspects of the project, are integral parts of the complete work. On the cover of one record, for example, one can read: “Pour le moment l’Afro reste une monnaie d’art pour les collectioneurs. C’est la raison pour laquelle j’interpelle les politiciens afin qu’ils se penchent à leur tour sur les questions de l’unification de l’Afrique et la création d’une Monnaie Unique africaine.”48 However, parts of this text production are clearly fictitious or faked entries, including the entry for “Afro” (currency) on Wikipedia, which states that the Afro is “the proposed official currency of the African Union” and that, within the framework of the Abuja Treaty of 1991, it was decided that the Afro would be introduced through

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Fig. 13: Meschac Gaba, Contemporary Archeology, 2003, multimedia installation with excavated objects, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

the African central bank until 2028.49 Mansour Ciss and his artist colleagues see themselves as part of the resistance against the economic and cultural exploitation and neo-colonial oppression of the African continent that still persists half a century after obtaining formal independence. They continually experiment with new artistic strategies and use the network of biennials and large-scale exhibitions as a platform to provide a greater response and reach for their concerns50 (fig. 12). As a medium of exchange, payment, and settlement, money and currency have always inspired artists to make projects which ironize, attack, manipulate, falsify or reinterpret the different parameters and aspects of the circulation of money — such as the 1993 Knochengeld-Projekt (Bonemoney-Project) organized by Wolfgang Krause in the Berlin 02 Gallery; Manfred Stumpf ’s Neuro-Banknotes presented in 1997 in the Forum of the Frankfurt Sparkasse; or Maria Fisahn’s performative money exchange projects in Hamburg.51 The Cameroonian sculptor Jean-Baptiste Ngetchopa and his over-sized bank notes, carved in solid wooden relief, of different currencies worldwide, can be read in this context as well.52 The artist Meschac Gaba, who comes from Benin and currently lives in Amsterdam, has likewise taken up the theme of fictitious banknotes and has made a connection to the processes of value creation in the art market. In his work Money Tree, Gaba assembles the faces of European primitivist artists (like Picasso for example), who were inspired by the arts of Africa, on West African CFA Bank notes.53 He later thanked the curators who showed individual rooms of his Museum of Contemporary African Art in their museums by gifting them over-sized banknotes in their respective currencies. For his multi-media installation Contemporary Archeology in the St. Louis Art Museum, Gaba buried discarded everyday objects in the

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Fig. 14: Meschac Gaba, Contemporary Archeology, 2003, multimedia installation: still from an animated video, ground penetrating radar of buried objects in the ground, interactive computer displays, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

earth, which enabled them to artificially age. He conducted interviews with the previous owners, or invented fictitious owners for the anonymous objects, and made individual sequences of these interviews into an audio-collage in which the banal objects are remembered with fake pathos and nostalgia. He then used images of the aging and patina process underground, captured through ground radar, in a video animation. Figures 13 and 14 (pl. X) show some of the aged everyday household objects and stills with colourful abstract echo patterns that could be seen in the exhibition on monitors. The subsequently excavated, artificially aged objects were presented as trophies on glass pedestals resting on earth balls covered in dollar notes. Gaba’s multi-media installation places the search for authenticity, as well as the archaeological and art historical creation of value through the ascription of age, into a critical light. Even if the objects want to appear antique and valuable, they remain what they are: simple and banal objects that are no longer in use. But the work can also be understood as a commentary on the practices and dealings with “tribal art objects,” in which African dealers artificially age and patinate newly cut sculptures through sooting and by burying them in termite hills to make the objects seem more authentic and desirable for buyers and collectors in the West.54 At the Dak’Art in 2014, Sam Hopkins depicted a series of twenty-four small format logos of the NGOs currently working in Kenya. The organizations position themselves strategically between charity, development, and humanitarian aid in their quest for donations, and in their programmes they employ developmental rhetoric with its central concepts of sustainability, capacity-building, upscaling, or synergy effects. The NGOs have evocative names like Hope, Concern, or Empathy and also fulfil African clichéd expectations of the West. Hopkins complicates his work by acknowledging in his artist’s statement that some of the logos are ficti-

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Fig. 15a + b: Sam Hopkins, from the series Logos of Non Profit Organisations Working in Kenya (some of which are imaginary), 2010–2014, dimension framed 20 × 20 × 5 cm

tious.55 Knowing about the fictionalization generates a moment of doubt for the viewer and — as the logos visually attest — there seems to be scarcely any difference between reality and fiction (figs. 15a + b).

Conclusion In this essay I have tried to survey a selection of contemporary artistic positions and projects that thematize and institutionally criticize notions of originality and strategies of authentication. Their (primarily) conceptually directed approaches can be located within the interstices of artistic research, appropriation art, fake, and intervention. The artists developed fictional projects (like invented artists, exhibitions, and art historians or invented islands, currency, goods, and brands) in order to explore and deconstruct the expectations of authenticity, the mechanisms of exclusion, and the value chains of the art and museum industry. The artistic practices and themes touched upon here are part of an increasingly borderless space of negotiation in which the effects of a colonial attribution of difference and patterns of othering are sometimes still clearly legible. At the same time, such practices delineate the contours of a new global contemporaneity beyond the boundaries of nation states and Eurocentric art historical narratives (including Art-Africanism) that can be addressed from different regions and subjectivities. This study also demonstrates that the majority of institutionally critical positions and projects originate from diasporic artists or artists from South Africa. This raises further questions about the particular situations and sensibilities of diasporic actors,56 which need to be investigated in more detail. A thorough critique would also include a critical

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questioning of the now ubiquitous concept of “Global Contemporary Art,”57 which has successfully detached itself from the inherent linearity of modernism and has now articulated itself as a worldwide archipelago of hybridity and multi-temporal heterogeneity with new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that stretch beyond the earlier originality and authenticity postulates. Authors like Sylvester Ogbechie58 have here critically objected that the bias towards diasporic positions espoused by curators like Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agolu59 systematically ignore and dismiss local negotiation processes and the art histories in Africa, which still need to be theorized. Alongside the questions raised here about a restoration of exclusion mechanisms through diasporic actors, it would also be tempting to take a closer look at the fictional projects created by European artists which have migrated to Africa, including the irritations and misunderstandings they have provoked. I am thinking in particular of the fictitious states of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and SOS (State of Sabotage by Robert Jelinek), which have both found the majority of their members in Nigeria and whose fictitious identification documents have found their way into non-art contexts, including the black market.60

Notes * Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in June 2012 as part of the series Art Unlimited and at the conference Testing and Contesting Regimes of Visuality held at the University of Cologne in July 2013. I thank Melanie Klein, Doris Rebhan, Paola Ivanov, Stefan Römer, Christian Hanussek and Bettina von Lintig for our conversations and their suggestions as well as Jesi Khadivi for her translation. 1 Hassan Musa, “Qui a inventé les Africains?,” Les Temps Modernes 620–621 (2002), 61−100. 2 Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller, eds., Authentizität: Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006); Thomas Fillitz and Jamie A. Saris, eds., Debating Authenticity. Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective (New York: Berghahn, 2013). 3 Achim Saupe, “Authentizität” in Zeitgeschichte: Konzepte und Methoden, ed. Frank Bösch and Jürgen Danyel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 144–165. 4 Mieke Bal, Kulturanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). 5 Oskar Beyer, Weltkunst: Von der Umwertung der Kunstgeschichte (Dresden: Sibyllen-Verlag, 1923). 6 Leo Frobenius, “Die Bildende Kunst der Afrikaner,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, Bd. 27, NF Bd. 17 (1897), 1–17; Leo Frobenius, Paideuma. Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Munich: Beck, 1921); Eckart von Sydow, Handbuch der Afrikanischen Plastik (Berlin: D. Reimer Verlag, 1930); Karl Kjersmeier, Centres de style de la sculpture nègre-africaine (Paris: A. Morancé, 1935). 7 Walter Benjamin, Aura und Reflexion. Schriften zur Kunsttheorie und Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 252. 8 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988); Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1989); Sally Price, Paris Primitive. Jacques Chirac’s Museum at the Quai Branly (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2007). 9 Regarding the Workshop Movement, see Sidney Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), and Sidney Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2013). On École de Dakar, see Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal 1960–1995 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004).

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10 Hassan Musa, “Art-Afrikanismus und zeitgenössische Kunst. Vier Fragen an Hassan Musa gestellt von Kerstin Pinther” in Black Paris. Kunst und Geschichte einer schwarzen Diaspora, ed. Tobias Wendl, Bettina von Lintig, and Kerstin Pinther (Wuppertal: Hammer, 2006), 405–412, here 408 and 410. 11 Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004). 12 Jean Loup Amselle, L’art de la friche. Essai sur l’art africain contemporain (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 43–58. 13 Tirdad Zolghadr, ed., Ethnic Marketing (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2007). 14 Daniela Roth, “People expect Africans to make masks. So I make masks” in Romuald Hazoumè. My Paradise. Made in Porto Novo, ed. Martin Henatsch (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 45–75, here 55. 15 Hazoumè in conversation with Sue Steward http://www.theartsdesk.com/features/romualdhazoumés-petrol-fumed-art (accessed March 2016). 16 Gabriele Riedle¸ “Ethno im Doppelpack,” Der Spiegel, 4 March 1996, 238–241, quoting Daniela Roth, Romuald Hazoumè: Mister Kanister und die orale Postmoderne (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), 54. 17 Roth, Romuald Hazoumè (cf. note 16), 91. 18 Ibid., 70–73. 19 Thomas Fillitz, Zeitgenössische Kunst aus Afrika. 14 Künstler aus Côte d’Ivoire und Bénin (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 152. 20 Roth, Romuald Hazoumè (cf. note 16), 136–138. 21 Ibid., 139–143. 22 Anja Lösel, “Königssohn kämpft gegen Sklaverei,” Der Stern, 27 August 2007, online at: http:// www.stern.de/kultur/kunst/documenta-kuenstler-hazoum233- koenigssohn-kaempft-gegen-sklaverei-596243.html (accessed March 2016). 23 Cheryl Bernstein, “The Fake as More” in Idea Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1973), 41–45. Thomas Crow, “The Return of Hank Herron” in Endgame. Reference and Simulations in Recent Paintings and Sculpture, ed. David Joselin and Elisabeth Sussmann (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, MIT Press, 1986), 11–27. 24 William Boyd, Nat Tate. An American Artist 1928–1960 (Cambridge: 21 Publishing Ltd, 1998). 25 Thomas Edlinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Fritz Ostermayer, eds., Wer erschoss Immanenz? Betrachtungen zur Dynamik von Aneignung und Intervention bei Georg Paul Thormann (Vienna: Edition Selene, 2002). 26 For an overview, see both thematic issues of Kunstforum International, ed. Thomas Wulffen, Fiktion der Kunst der Fiktion 202 (May–June 2010) and 204 (October–November 2010). 27 Stefan Römer, Künstlerische Strategien des Fake: Zur Kritik von Original und Fälschung (Cologne: DuMont, 2001), 17. Translation from German. 28 Clive Kellner, ed., Kendell Geers 1988–2012 (Munich: Prestel, 2013), 63. 29 Ibid., 24. 30 Steven Stern, “A Fraction of the Whole,” Frieze 121 (2009), online at: https://frieze.com/article/ fraction-whole?language=de (accessed March 2016). Hammons’ works have already been taken up by various artists and newly staged by, among others, Roi Vaara under the title Lumipallokauppias (Snow Ball Seller) in Helsinki 2007, Ergin Soyal’s Wish me luck David Hammons in Eskişehir/Turkey 2012, and Joe Scanlan’s Blizzard Ball Sale with styrofoam balls in a gallery exhibition in 2009. 31 Phoebe Hoban, “The Shock of the Familiar,” New York Magazine, 28 July 2003, online at: http:// nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/n_9014 (accessed March 2016). Salah M. Hassan, “Fred Wilson’s Black Venezia: Fictitious Histories and the Notion of ‘Truth’,” Nka, Journal of Contemporary Art 19 (2004), 12–19. 32 Barthélémy Toguo, The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris musées. Palais de Tokyo, 2004), 53. 33 Text from the artist’s website: www.barthelemytoguo.com/2oeuvres/3performances/transit.html (accessed March 2016). See also, Simon Critchley and Mami Kataoka, eds., Laughing in a Foreign Language (London: Hayward Gallery, 2008), 128–131. 34 Project documentation from the artist’s website. http://www.beezybailey.co.za/art-item/joycentobe/ (accessed March 2016). 35 Ibid.

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36 Katrin Skawran and Norman Catherine, “Walter Battiss and Fook Island. An Interview” in Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist (Johannesburg: Standard Bank Centre Art Gallery, 2005), 49−54. The Johannesburg Gallery AOP showed an anthology of Fook works by Battiss and Catherine titled Fook Island: Art & Objects. 37 Deborah Lee Lutrin, Walter Battiss and the Golden Age: A Modernist Project (MA thesis, Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand, 1998), 77–84. 38 Cédric Vincent, “Fake it till you make it: Über die Rolle von sich selbst erfüllenden Vorhersagen im Kunstfeld,” Springerin 2 (2008), online at: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid= 2066&lang=de (accessed March 2016). 39 Anthea Buys, “The Brink of Fame,” Mail & Guardian, 23 April 2010, online at: http://mg.co.za/ article/2010-04-23-the-brink-of-fame (accessed March 2016). 40 Online at: http://www.artthrob.co.za/08sept/interview_kentridge.html (accessed March 2016). 41 Nastio Mosquito, “Nastia’s Manifesto,” Vimeo video, 2008, 4 min. http://www.vimeo.com/21977569 (accessed March 2016). 42 On the occasion of the exhibition “His Masters’ Tools: Recent Work by Allan deSouza” at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles 2011, online at: http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/ allan-desouza (accessed March 2016). For more details on deSouzas artistic practice, see Doris Rebhan, Fiktion und künstlerisches Fake im Werk von Allan deSouza. Das Kunstwerk als Interaktion mit fingierten Gesprächspartnern (MA thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2016). 43 The conference programme can be found online at: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~afrart/program _afrart.htm (accessed March 2016). Dr. Moi Tsien is announced here with a lecture entitled “Fly Boy: Allan deSouza’s Traveling Photography.” 44 Jerome Sens, “The Right Position. An Interview with Kader Attia” in Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, ed. Gilane Tawadros and Sarah Campbell (London: Iniva 2003), 105–124, here 112–13. 45 Tami Katz-Freiman, “The Road to Happiness. On Cultural Conflict, Desire, and Illusion in the Work of Kader Attia” in Kader Attia (Zurich: Ringier, 2006), 18–26, 20–22. 46 Kamel Mennour in conversation with Pierre-Evariste Douaire, online at http://www.paris-art. com/interview-artiste/kamel-mennour/nobuyoshi-araki/117.html#haut (accessed March 2016). See also Kerstin Pinther, “Die Banlieue als Thema der zeitgenössischen Kunst” in Black Paris. ed. Wendl, von Lintig and Pinther (cf. note 10), 391–395. 47 See www.mansourciss.de (accessed March 2016). 48 Translation: “The Afro remains an art currency for collectors at this point. For this reason, I appeal to politicians to finally address the question of African unity and the related creation of an African currency.” 49 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro_(W%C3%A4hrung) (accessed March 2016). 50 For a timeline of the project, see Kerstin Pinther and Tobias Wendl, “Die Gespenster der Vergangenheit vertreiben: Das Laboratoire ‘Déberlinisation’ und die imaginäre Afro-Währung von Mansour Ciss” in Black Berlin: Die deutsche Metropole und ihre afrikanische Diaspora in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Oumar Diallo and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Metropol, 2013), 198–211. 51 Jürgen Raap, Das Schicksal des Geldes. Kunst und Geld: Eine Bilanz zum Jahrtausendwechsel (= Kunstforum International 149) (Ruppichteroth: Verlag Kunstforum, 2000). 52 See Alfons Hug ed., Neue Kunst aus Afrika (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 1996), 154–155. 53 Meschac Gaba, Museum of Contemporary African Art, vol. 1: The Library of the Museum (Amsterdam: Artimo Foundation, 2001), 63–64. 54 Shannon Fitzgerald, “A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad” in A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum, 2003), 1–39, here 19–22. 55 Aliou Ndiaye, ed., 11ème Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain (Dakar: Secrétariat Général de la Biennale des Arts de Dakar, 2014), 100–101. 56 See Sidney L. Kasfir, “Creativity and Migration. Back to Nietzsche, Wolfe and Simmel’s Stranger?,” Critical Interventions 7 (2010), 84–100. 57 See Hal Foster, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” October 130 (2009), 3–124; Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012); Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009); Hans Belting,

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Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013). 58 Sylvester Ogbechie, “The Curator as Cultural Broker: A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art,” lecture manuscript, conference The task of the curator, Santa Cruz, University of California, online at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgibin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-afrarts&month=1006&week=c&msg=NTXOqsuc5AhVwM8Z jJEZWg&user=&pw= (accessed March 2016). 59 Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art since 1980 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009). 60 Imke Arns, “The Nigerian Connection. On NSK Passports as Escape and Entry Vehicles” in State of Emergence: A Documentary of the First NSK Citizen’s Congress, ed. Alexei Monroe (Leipzig: Plöttner Verlag, 2011), 104–111; Robert Jelinek, ed., Offshore Census: Citizens of the State of Sabotage (Vienna: Springer, 2011).

Illustrations Fig. 1: Hassan Musa, Suzanne et les vieillards, 2007, ink on textile, Galerie Pascal Polar, Brussels (photo: Tobias Wendl). Fig. 2: Romuald Hazoumè, Roulette béninoise, 2004, baryte print, dimensions variable, courtesy October Gallery, London (reproduced from: Romuald Hazoumè. My Paradise — Made in Porto Novo, ed. Martin Henatsch, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010, 30). Fig. 3: Romuald Hazoumè, La bouche du roi, 1997–2005, found objects and video installation, Collection of the British Museum (reproduced from: http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/images/760x570/hazoume_laboucheduroi.jpg). Fig. 4: Kendell Geers, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1993, performance, photograph, 191.8 × 72.1 cm © Kendell Geer, Courtesy Stephen Friedman, London / Yvon Lambert, Paris (reproduced from: Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art since 1980, Bologna: Damiani, 2009, 162). Fig. 5: David Hammons, Blizz-aard-Ball-Sale, performance, New York, 1983, photograph: Dawoud Bey, courtesy of the Tilton Gallery, New York (reproduced from: http://67.media.tumblr. com/tumblr_m9v2l2WJAo1qhci8no1_500.jpg). Fig. 6: Fred Wilson, Bag Sales, performance in front of the US-American pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2003, courtesy of the artist and Fred Wilson Studio, New York. Fig. 7: Barthélémy Toguo, Transit 1, performance, 1996, colour photography (reproduced from: Barthélémy Toguo, The Sick Opera, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2004, 53). Fig. 8: Barthélémy Toguo, Transit 6, performance, 1999, colour photography (reproduced from: Barthélémy Toguo, The Sick Opera, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2004, 52). Fig. 9: Walter Battiss, Fook Waste Bag, depicting Fook king Ferd the 3rd aka Walter Battiss, undated, silkscreen on paper bag, 30.5 × 17.5 cm, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (reproduced from: Walter Battiss–Gentle Anarchist, exhibition catalogue, Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2005, 52). Fig. 10: Kader Attia, Machine à rêve, installation, mixed media, Venice Biennale, 2003, courtesy of the artist and private collection (reproduced from: Black Paris. Kunst und Geschichte einer schwarzen Diaspora, eds. Tobias Wendl, Bettina von Lintig and Kerstin Pinther, Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2006, 265). Fig. 11: Kader Attia, Boutique Hallal at Galerie Kamel Mennour, interior view, Paris, 2004, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour (reproduced from: Black Paris. Kunst und Geschichte einer schwarzen Diaspora, eds. Tobias Wendl, Bettina von Lintig and Kerstin Pinther, Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2006, 390). Fig. 12: Mansour Ciss, 100 Afro Note, 2004 (Second Edition), 14 × 6.5 cm, courtesy of the artist. Fig. 13: Meschac Gaba, Contemporary Archeology, 2003, multimedia installation with excavated objects, courtesy of the artist, realized with assistance from Contemporary Art Museum

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St. Louis (reproduced from: A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, eds. Shannon Fitzgerald and Tumelo Mosaka, exhibition catalogue, St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum, 2003, 104). Fig. 14: Meschac Gaba, Contemporary Archeology, 2003, multimedia installation: still from an animated video, ground penetrating radar of buried objects in the ground, interactive computer displays (reproduced from: A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, eds. Shannon Fitzgerald and Tumelo Mosaka, exhibition catalogue, St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum, 2003, 105). Figs. 15a + b: Sam Hopkins, from the series Logos of Non Profit Organisations Working in Kenya (some of which are imaginary), 2010–2014, silkscreen prints, dimension framed 20 × 20 × 5 cm, courtesy of the artist.

PARTHA MITTER

Jamini Roy Negotiating the Global from a Local Perspective Negotiating art historical narratives inevitably raises questions about the fraught relationship between universal art history and local art practices. Art history as a discipline arose in the mid-eighteenth century, and it owes a substantial amount to the German antiquarian and pioneering archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) whose Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Art in Antiquity), published in 1764, became the discipline’s foundational text.1 The rise of art history coincided with European expansion overseas: to take the British Empire as an example, the colonial Archaeological Survey of India was responsible for documenting and classifying ancient and medieval remains methodically in the nineteenth century. This gave the pioneering art and architectural historian James Fergusson the wherewithal to construct the modern subject of Indian art history. Indeed, Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture2 became a classic text, which provided the essential framework for all subsequent histories of Indian art and architecture. As an indirect disciple of Winckelmann,3 the Scottish architectural historian evaluated Indian art through the lens of classical art; the cultural implications of this bias have had longstanding consequences for subsequent studies. One of the significant implications of the introduction of European aesthetics was the advent of a cultural revolution in India, which also occurred in other parts of Asia, including Japan and China. From the 1850s onwards, colonial art schools in India championed academic art based on classical style, a taste that would become ingrained in the Indian psyche.4 With the introduction of modernist aesthetics in the early twentieth century, academic art in the West was thrown into turmoil; by the 1920s, the avant-garde had overtaken the traditionalists in France, Germany, Italy, and Russia. Indeed, modernism soon began to impact countries outside the metropolitan West, and Eastern artists began to interact seriously with the syntax of cubism and other formal devices of modernism. It was in this context that an event of historic importance took place in the city of Calcutta. The year 1922 is regarded as a high point in the history of modernism, epitomised by a dinner party that took place at the Majestic Hotel in Paris and was attended by the leading lights of the avant-garde: Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Pablo Picasso.5 It is perhaps no coincidence that Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and other Bauhaus artists showed their works in Calcutta in the same year.6 This exhibition took place for a complex set of reasons: Firstly, Bengali

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writers and scholars had begun expanding their intellectual horizon beyond the English-speaking world during the interwar years. This enabled them to liberate themselves mentally from the dominance of colonial rule.7 Germans, who had suffered a great deal of anxiety in the aftermath of 1918, found much to sympathise with in colonised India. Secondly, the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate, was received with particular enthusiasm in Germany. In 1919, his birthday was celebrated at the National Theatre in Weimar, and his personal reputation encouraged the Bauhaus artists to send their work to Calcutta. Stella Kramrisch, an Austrian art historian who worked at Tagore’s university at Santiniketan, negotiated the importation of actual works. In her introduction to the catalogue, she pointed out the intellectual affinities between the Bengal School of painting and the Bauhaus. The Calcutta exhibition was a landmark in global modernism, where artists from the metropolitan centre, namely Kandinsky and others, were shown alongside the anti-naturalist painters of the nationalist Bengal School. Their common goal was to offer resistance to academic naturalism as an emblem of global capitalism.8 However, this episode remained hidden from the dominant narratives of modernism. By the end of the twentieth century, rapid globalisation, monster biennials, international art fairs, and auction house forays into the non-Western world have brought artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the global arena. Nonetheless, in the final analysis Western aesthetic norms have continued to dominate discourses on art.9 The thrust of my paper is to foreground the complex relationship between the local and the global, taking note of the fact that the Western modernist canon continues to exercise authority over global art, but I shall also argue that certain artists have succeeded in transcending this sense of dependency by creating works of great power and originality. As someone who works on the history of modernism in India, I have chosen a remarkable Indian avant-garde artist of the colonial era who epitomised the complex relationship between the local and the global––Jamini Roy (1887–1972). The fact that art historical discourses continue to be oblivious to developments outside Europe and America was demonstrated recently at an influential seminar on art and globalisation that was held in Chicago in 2007.10 At the seminar a great deal of intense soul-searching took place as to the direction of art writing in the era of biennials and art fairs, which are so dependent on the market. However, in any discussions of modernist art around the world one of the unstated assumptions was the dialectic between the “universality of art,” which is often taken for granted, and the peculiar artistic expressions of different nationalities. In all discussions of modernism (including its offshoots, late- and postmodernism), the “unmarked case” is always the Western model. Indeed, Western modernism is easily interchangeable with “modernism,” whereas all other modernisms––Indian modernism, African modernism, Mexican modernism and so on–– have to be qualified. In response to the intervention by an Indian participant in Chicago, who suggested that India had developed its own “homegrown modernism” as part of India’s modernisation and the creation of a democratic state, the convener, James Elkins,

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questioned the possibility of non-Western modernism being relevant to Western art history, or universal art history. Let me quote Elkins’s exact words here: “The painters you admire, Jamini Roy among them, cannot be described in texts that will be read in Western Europe and North America in such a way that the artists appear necessary (his italics) to modernism. They are representable as local, but not as necessary.”11 Even though the participants of the seminar were critical of the Eurocentric limitations of art history in a relativist vein, the significant phrase, “necessary to modernism,” reveals a strong conviction in the universality of Western modernism, “the unmarked case” as it were. To be fair to Elkins, his view is not exceptional, and he was in fact merely stating a commonplace. But given this perspective, let me pose the questions: Can Jamini Roy ever be relevant to the history of global modernism? And how do we negotiate the fractured relationship between the modernist canon that claims to be universalist and non-Western art production that is viewed as marginal and local? The definition of the centre and the periphery is an indirect product of the sixteenth-century Italian artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari’s linear interpretation of art history. His notions of artistic progress were based on classical aesthetic taste, which automatically excluded those art forms that did not conform. Vasari’s master narrative in his seminal work, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, defined Florence, Rome, and Venice as centres of innovation and categorised other regions in Italy as sites of delayed growth and imitation. In studies of Renaissance art inspired by Vasari, periphery becomes a matter of geography and not one of art history.12 In the late eighteenth century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose own preference was for Greek art, reconfigured and reified these prejudices by formulating climatic, national, and racial differences in art as objective facts.13 To be sure, the Western avant-garde was at the forefront in challenging the hegemonic claims of academic art. Yet the implied hierarchy in the centre/periphery relationship could not be easily resolved. With the emergence of global modernity, all artistic productions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became marginal to the preoccupations of the core, that is, to the art of Paris and later post-war London and New York, and even later to Munich and Berlin. In short, the centre/periphery relationship is not only one of geography, but also one of power and authority, which affects race, gender, and sexual orientation. Given this situation, how can we study the intersection of cultures and the “crossing of cultural borders”? Can contact zones ever be devoid of power relations in the global colonial (or postcolonial) order? Mary Louise Pratt defines the contact zone “as a space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”14 While Pratt does not discount the role of power, her approach can allow for the possibility of a more productive relationship between cultures as a species of encounter, exchange, and negotiation. During the period of European expansion, the world underwent an unprecedented communication revolution. Speaking on nationalism, Benedict Anderson

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proposed the notion of “imagined communities” created by print capitalism.15 I extend Anderson’s concept of the imagined community to the global level. Transmission of knowledge between centre and periphery took place through the spread of the hegemonic languages of English, French, and Spanish, and through print culture. Members of these virtual communities had no direct contact with one another, but they shared a social or intellectual space. After all, people all over the world read books and journals. I have called this imagined community a “virtual cosmopolis.”16 The “virtual cosmopolitan” in the colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America engaged with the printed text emanating from the centre to generate new forms of knowledge. The concept gives due recognition to the coexistence and mutual influence of multiple cultures within this informal global network. In short, intellectuals not only in Asia but also in Europe, were operating in a virtual space that generated a mode of conversation across cultures that led to the production of new ideas. How can we study those cultural exchanges that were not prejudged by colonial power relations? The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “dialogic” to describe a continuous dialogue with other works of literature. The process appropriates the words of others and transforms them according to one’s own creative intentions. This inter-textual process is dynamic and engaged in endless re-descriptions of one’s own world vision. Bakhtin’s literary concept could be a useful tool for our own cross-cultural analysis of art — a dialogic relationship between the global and the vernacular within a cosmopolitan framework. The particular merit of the dialogic method is that it does not set up an essentialist hierarchy of ideas, as seen for instance in the case of colonial discourse.17 Set against this theoretical framework, Jamini Roy’s modernist paintings make sense as an expression of engagement with global modernity, a subject that will be elaborated on in the following pages. Roy was indeed a painter of remarkable power and originality, one who was recognised in his own time: Peggy Guggenheim bought several of his paintings;18 and his work inspired a design used by the American company Steuben Glass, which was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1954.19 Nonetheless, he hardly features in any significant books on the history of modernism. One way to understand Jamini Roy’s position within global modernism is to examine closely the concept of primitivism, one of the most profound counter-tendencies in the modern industrial age. Although primitivism as a social critique has been around since antiquity, its more recent resurgence in the West is connected with the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century; it represents the romantic longing of a complex society for the simplicity of pre-modern existence. Nineteenth-century utopians blamed the crisis of the industrial age on Enlightenment rationality, and they turned to primitivism with ardour. Though primitivism helped to temper the relentless progressivism of colonial-industrial modernity, one cannot ignore the inner tensions and contradictions within the concept. For instance, it can be held responsible for sustaining colonial hegemony in its representations of the non-West, and especially in its consumption of primitive art.20 However, the very ambiguities of primitivism offered the colonised a powerful weapon with

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which to interrogate colonial/capitalist modernity and to create a counter-modern discourse of resistance. The periphery simply turned the “outward gaze” of Europe back onto the West, deploying the very same device of cultural criticism to challenge the “urban-industrial” values of colonial empires. Primitivists did not deny the importance of technology in contemporary life; what they questioned was the teleological certainty of modernity. In the 1920s, this new tendency became a cultural and political force in India and a reflection of a changing political situation. Part of the reason for the rise of a form of primitivism in India was the transformation of elite nationalism into a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi.21 The other leading spokesman for primitivism was the poet Rabindranath Tagore, both of whom were trenchant critics of Western industrial society.22 Although primitivism became a leading trope for artists, no one offered a more radical or consistent ideology of primitivism than Jamini Roy; and in the following, we shall see why this was so. Therefore, let us think of primitivism not as a form of European consumption, but instead as a global discourse. As an expression of critical modernity, primitivism bridged the gap between the eastern and western enemies of industrial capitalism on a virtual level. Jamini Roy was descended from Indian landed gentry. His career began inauspiciously as a student at the colonial art school in Calcutta in the 1920s. He trained in academic naturalism and had a strong feeling for the human form, which shaped his early ambitions of becoming a successful portrait painter; and he formed an artist’s circle with like-minded academic painter friends. However, Roy had a restless nature that constantly thrived on experimentation, frequently adopting pastiche as an artistic discourse.23 For a while he was also attracted to the influential anti-academic group of nationalist painters who came together under Abanindranath Tagore, and were engaged in a historicist exercise of “excavating” precolonial artistic traditions from the past.24 The most talked about discovery of the 1920s was “subaltern art”––the folk art of rural Bengal and the “low” art of urban Calcutta known as Kalighat paintings. Jamini Roy took to Kalighat with enthusiasm, copying its visual language with great care. However, he soon tired of Kalighat because he felt that by moving to Calcutta from the village and adopting colonial values these former folk artists had betrayed their rural ideal. His disillusionment with colonial Calcutta was expressed in a series of moral contrasts drawn between rural honesty and urban decadence.25 By this time he began to see his aim more clearly, which was to restore the precolonial community that had been severed from national life with the advent of colonial rule, through art. With this objective he made his historic journey into the villages of Bengal, systematically collecting specimens of folk art and taking lessons from folk painters. Roy’s landmark exhibition took place in 1931 and was based on the experience he had gained on his travels. He exhibited his experiments in emulating village scroll paintings, which he juxtaposed with scroll paintings produced by village painters. Quite cleverly the exhibition evoked a rural atmosphere by replacing commonly used European furniture with Indian cushions, by placing clay lamps in different parts of the room, and by decorating the floors with Bengali alpona patterns that were traditionally made by

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women; however, he wished to emphasise that the event was neither a form of revivalism, nor an expression of nativism. A perceptive journalist who attended the show immediately sensed its strong political undercurrent.26 In the 1920s, politics in India was reaching a new level of complexity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, historicism and the search for a pan-Indian past was the order of the day. In a paradoxical development, as local politics became more attuned to the global, Indian nationalists began to question the general, undifferentiated pan-Indian idea of the nation. The focus thus shifted from the past to the local, regional expressions, and to the countryside. Roy’s search for formalist simplicity led him to the village painters whose rapid lines and expressive contours enclosed the human form in one big sweep. He admired what he called their honesty and their ability to simplify and to create universal, timeless symbols. Their bold and simple pat or scroll painting helped wean Roy away from naturalism. Nonetheless, his academic training offered an underlying structure to his painting that was not usually found in folk art. For instance, Roy made careful preparations in order to attain the volume, rhythm, decorative clarity, and monumental quality of the pat in his work, commencing with an austere phase of monochrome brush drawings. He then restricted his palette to seven basic colours: Indian red, yellow ochre, cadmium green, vermillion, charcoal grey, cobalt blue, and white — all made from organic matter. Jamini Roy’s aim was not to imitate village artisans, but rather to learn how they achieved such expressive power in their lines. In the process he developed a unique style of radical simplicity, ruthlessly paring down inessential details to achieve monumental simplicity (fig. 1, pl. XI). The intimate connection between a vital artistic tradition and its mythological richness became the central plank in his theory of collective art.27 It is no surprise that Roy felt deep affinities with the symbolic forms of Byzantine art. He often spoke of the pivotal role of sacred art in a community, which offered it cohesion. A Hindu by birth, he even sought to better understand the spiritual aspect of Christianity by representing Christ. The wife of the governor of Bengal and a discerning collector, Maie Casey, owned Roy’s “superb drawing in lamp-black, and a painting of Christ with his disciples — strange solemn picture in which the enlarged central figure has long eyes that project beyond the face.” She was curious to know why a non-Christian should be so moved by Christianity. The artist’s answer was that “he wanted to attempt a subject remote from his own life and to show that the human and the divine could be combined only through symbols.”28 Roy began copying Byzantine art (possibly as early as the 1940s) in search of a perfectly hieratic, full-frontal monumental style. It inspired one of his more magnificent compositions, Three Women––simple, serene, and graceful. Through the folk idiom, Roy sought to restore the link between art and society and in the process to repudiate the twin hallmarks of colonial art: artistic individualism and the Benjaminian “aura” of an “original” work of art. He argued that since rural collective art no longer existed in the West, Picasso and others had to resort to imitating the art of Africa. In contrast, he contended that “primitive” culture still flourished among the rural and tribal peoples of Bengal. But he was not aware that Kandinsky and other

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Fig. 1: Jamini Roy, Mother and Child, c. 1940s, dimension unknown, courtesy of the artist’s family

artists were trying to return to the collective art of the village. During the period of Roy’s burgeoning familiarity with modernism, art critics tended to stress the formal aspects of Kandinsky’s paintings and to neglect other aspects of his work, including his debt to Russian peasant art. Also, Roy would not have been aware that in 1930s Germany a group of influential primitivists were debating the connection between the vitality of an artistic tradition and its mythological richness, which had been torn asunder by the Industrial Revolution and had caused the decline of communal cohesion and created social alienation. Their debate had remarkable parallels with Roy’s central doctrine of the communal function of art––namely, the connection between the vitality of an artistic tradition and its mythological richness. The question that both the Germans and Roy were asking was whether art should be for individual pleasure or for the community. The critic Wilhelm Hausenstein, for instance, explained the modernist movement as a restoration of the collective function of art. Likewise, Carl Einstein, who also defined “primitive art” in terms of its communal function, saw the modern “primitives” and “primitive” peoples as having similar objectives of integrating individual experience with communal life through myths and rituals.29 Today we can see the striking similarities between Roy’s primitivism and that of Kandinsky and other primitivists. Another useful comparison is the artist Oskar Schlemmer’s murals at the Folkwang Museum in Essen in Germany. The German

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expressionist, who like Roy wished to create an art of collective identity, considered non-naturalist treatment of the human form as superior to illusionism because of its symbolic nature. Schlemmer’s use of simple modes of representation sprang from his conviction that the earlier social function of art was about to be regenerated in his own time. He stated: In all earlier cultures, high cultures, in that of the Egyptians, the early Greeks, in early Indian art, the human form was far removed from a naturalistic image, but was accordingly that much closer to a lapidary symbolic form: to the idol, to the doll. These symbolic forms were formerly nourished and generated out of religions dedicated to Gods or to Nature. We today, who lack the great symbols and ways of seeing of the Ancients, because we live in a time of decadence.30

It would be interesting to know whether the 1922 exhibition of Bauhaus artists in Calcutta, including Kandinsky and Klee, made any impact on Roy. He was at the art school at the time, but we have no evidence that he saw the show. And though Schlemmer was at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, he did not take part in the Calcutta show. Significantly, these European artists were placed alongside the anti-naturalist painters of the nationalist Bengal School. As the catalogue of the exhibition points out, their common goal was to offer resistance to academic naturalism as an emblem of global capitalism.31 How are we to understand the commonalities between a German and an Indian artist, not to mention the influential group of primitivists in Germany, in far-flung corners of the earth? The important point that cannot be overemphasised here is that there were no exchanges, stylistic or otherwise, between Roy and the European primitivists. Indeed, Roy’s work was far removed from the work of the German and Russian expressionists. How then can we understand their seeming affinities? I would like to propose here an argument I have been developing for some time, namely that there are simply “structural affinities” between Roy’s primitivism and the avant-garde critics of modernity in the West. Although historically they arrived at their respective critiques of modernity through different routes, one feature shared by Roy and the Western primitivists was a rejection of universals, whether from a unifying “capitalist” or from a “nationalist” perspective. I have mentioned that in the 1920s Indian nationalists were moving away from the concept of pan-Indian nationalism towards regional and local expressions. Roy’s belief in political heterogeneity, his insistence on “locality” as the site of the nation, and his preference for multiple aesthetic possibilities were part of these new developments in the twenties. They were also uncannily similar to the ideas of the German expressionists. I call these intersections structural affinities in a “virtual global community,” since neither necessarily knew of the existence of the other. I must add a note of caution here: there were indeed important differences between Roy and the German primitivists: The Western primitivists were chiefly preoccupied with the predicament of urban existence, whereas Roy used primitivism as a weapon against colonialism. While Western primitivists aimed at merging art with life in a repudiation of the aesthetics of autonomy, they never ceased to believe in the unique quality of aesthetic experience. By contrast, Roy sought to erase the

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special status of the artist, deliberately seeking to subvert the distinction between individual and collaborative contribution in a work of art. Roy often playfully signed a painting produced by his son or others working with him. His aim was to reduce the importance of signature, which was his way of subverting what Walter Benjamin has called the “aura” of a masterpiece.32 At one time Roy even turned his studio into a workshop to reproduce his works cheaply; this was not a success for various reasons over which Roy had no control.33 What becomes clear, however, is that this Indian painter deliberately eschewed artistic individualism and the notion of artistic progress, the sine quibus non of colonial art schools. His communitarian art turned its back on colonial culture, seeking instead to restore the simple goodness of art that had been lost to the elite of the colonial metropolis. This could not be wholly achieved because Roy was a loner, a remote and isolated figure without the support of like-minded artists. Nonetheless, what remains is the artistic achievement––the brilliant colours and bold lines, the formalist brevity, self-assurance, and simplicity of expression––of his paintings; these formalist devices became a vehicle for his deep but understated social commitment. The range of his oeuvre was small, but within his self-imposed limits Roy achieved something that possibly no other artist in India did in the colonial era. His greatness lies in the simple fact that, despite never venturing beyond his home in Calcutta (apart from occasional visits to his home village), from his locality he offered through his art something that had global resonance and relevance.

Notes 1 Johann J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Waltherische Hofbuchhandlung, 1764–1767). 2 James Fergusson, The History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London: John Murray, 1876). See also Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters. A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), chapter VI, 260–267, and Ernst Hans Gombrich, “Norm and Form. The Stylistic Categories of Art History and their Origins in Renaissance Ideals” in Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), 81–98. 3 Winckelmann’s description of Greek sculpture as expressing “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” became the foundation of the eighteenth-century classical revival and was used to evaluate the Baroque as decadent and Rococo as frivolous. This judgment of taste inspired generations of Europeans and was the foundation for Fergusson’s description of early Buddhist sculpture as the epitome of perfection and all subsequent periods of Indian art as “written in decay,” especially the “decadent” and florid South Indian temples. 4 See Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), Part One. 5 Richard Davenport-Hines, A Night at the Majestic. Proust & the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 (London: Faber and Faber, 2012). Kevin Jackson provocatively titles his book 1922. The Birth of Modernism (London: Pegasus Books, 2011), which marks the appearance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Johannes Itten’s notes for the entries dated 7 May 1921: “Rabindranath Tagore tritt an seinem 60. Geburtstag mit einem Programm aus Rezitationen und Liedern im Deutschen Nationaltheater auf ”; and 1 October 1922–March 1923, “Bauhaus-Ausstellung in der Society of Oriental Art in Kalkutta; Leitung: Dr. Abanindranath Tagore (ein Neffe des Dichters). Organisation in Weimar durch Georg Muche” in Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten, exhibition catalogue Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1994), 516–518.

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6 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism. India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 17. 7 See Kris Manjapra for a comprehensive account of the cultural exchanges between Bengali and German intellectuals in Age of Entanglement. German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2014). 8 An exhibition reconstructing this historic exhibition in Calcutta in 1922 was held in 2013 at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. It was curated by Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg and advised by me. It was partly inspired by my paper on transcultural exchanges in modernity delivered in Berlin, 2009. See Partha Mitter, “Bauhaus in Kalkutta” in Bauhaus Global. Gesammelte Beiträge der Konferenz Bauhaus Global vom 21. bis 26. September 2009, ed. Annemarie Jaeggi (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, 2011), 149–158. For the catalogue of the exhibition in 2013 at Dessau, see Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg, eds., Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta. Eine Begegnung kosmopolitischer Avantgarden, exhibition catalogue Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung (Dessau: Hatje Cantz Bauhaus Edition 36, 2013). 9 Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism. Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90/4 (December 2008), 531–548. 10 Art and Globalization is the first book in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, which deals with contemporary theoretical issues based on week-long seminars held at the Art Institute of Chicago and led by James Elkins. 11 James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharsky, and Alice Kim, eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2010), 120. For a more questioning view that reveals the weakness of Eurocentric art history, see the papers in Per Bäkström and Benedikt Hjartarson, eds., Decentring the Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). 12 Giancarla Periti, Emilia e Marche nel Renascimento: L’Identità Visiva della “Periferia” (Azzano San Paolo: Bolis Edizioni, 2005) with an introduction by Pier Luigi De Vecchi and Giancarla Periti, 7–11. See also Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg, eds., “Centro e periferia” in Storia dell’arte italiana 1 (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1979), 285–354. 13 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “National Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments in the Historiography of Art” in History of Art, Aesthetics and Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 71–84, gives a scholarly account of art historians’ national prejudices and the attempts to circumvent them. 14 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. 15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 16 See, for instance, “Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange. The Case of India and America,” in East-West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship, ed. Cynthia Mills et al. (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2012), 20–37. 17 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), and Michael Holquist, Dialogism. Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 2002). Partha Mitter, “Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism. Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange. The Case of India and America” in East-West Interchanges in American Art. A Long and Tumultuous Relationship, ed. Cynthia Mills et al. (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2012), 20–37. See also “Interview. A ‘Virtual Cosmopolis.’ Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey,” Art Bulletin 95/3 (September 2013), 381–392. 18 In 1954 Peggy Guggenheim paid a brief visit to India and met the artist, whom she considered the only real modernist in India. See Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century. Confessions of an Art Addict (London: André Deutsch, 1979), 351–353. 19 See Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism. (cf. note 6), 111. 20 Hoxi N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage. A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1928); Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1935); Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism. Perspectives on Art (London: Routledge, 1991);

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21 In the 1920s, the Indian elite discovered primitive tribes as well as folk and cheap popular art. However, I use primitivism also as an alternative form of modernity that challenged the progressivism of urban capitalism and colonialism. In this sense Mahatma Gandhi was one of the most celebrated primitivists who dubbed the West a slave to the machine. This primitivism became a form of resistance to British colonial rule and enabled the Indian nationalists to discover peasant and rural India. 22 Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali (Centenary Edition in Bengali), XI (Kolkata: Asha Prakashani, 1961), 589. His essay “Tapoban” (The Hermitage) was originally published in the literary magazine Prabasi in 1316 (1909). Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or, Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1938). 23 I call Roy’s pastiche a discourse in the sense that it had an underlying political agenda and was not a random act. The aim behind his copying was heuristic in that he set himself up agonistically against a whole range of styles and cultures that served as a counterpoint to the evolution of his own visual expression. 24 See Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism (cf. note 4), 219–374. 25 Roy made this important contrast in an interview, but he did not develop it pictorially. See Jamini Roy, “Potua Shilpa” in Jamini Roy, ed. Bishnu Dey (Kolkata: Asha Prakashani, 1384 [1977]). 26 Shanta Devi, “Shilpi jaminiranjan raier pradarshani,” Prabasi (Vaisakh, 1339 [1931]), 25. 27 Roy uses collective art in the Marxist sense as a non-elite, non-individualist art produced by and for the people. It is the same as communal art. 28 Maie Casey, Tides and Eddies (London: M. Joseph, 1966), 183. 29 See Charles W. (Mark) Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler’s critical translations and introductions: C. W. Haxthausen, “Bloody Serious, Two Texts by Carl Einstein,” October 105 (Summer 2003), 105–124; Carl Einstein, “Negro Sculpture,” trans. Haxthausen and Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004), 122–138; Carl Einstein, “Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition,” trans. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004), 139–145; Carl Einstein, “Methodological Aphorisms,” trans. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004), 146–150. In the aftermath of the war, Einstein was seen as a right-wing conservative, but recent writers have provided powerful revisions in support of Einstein’s social critique of Western urban capitalism. See David Pan, Primitive Renaissance (Nebraska: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001). 30 Schlemmer explained his ideas in an article. See Oskar Schlemmer, “Zu meinen Wandbildern für das Museum Folkwang in Essen,” Museum der Gegenwart 29 (1930–1931), 147–151. I am indebted to Mark Haxthausen for this passage and for its translation. 31 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism (cf. note 6). 32 This celebrated work is widely known. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations (London: Penguin, 1955), 211–244. 33 Roy sought to produce art for the people by making his works inexpensive and by producing works with his son and with other collaborators in a collective effort; he even refused to sign his works. However, his utopian ideas did not have much success, as it was wealthy connoisseurs rather than the poor who began to buy them up, thus undermining his aim of producing impersonal art for the people. The “aura” of his work had become too overwhelming.

Illustration Fig. 1: Jamini Roy, Mother and Child, c. 1940s, gouache on board, dimensions unknown (courtesy of the artist’s family).

III. PRACTICES

PAULINE BACHMANN

Grasping Writing and Form Neoconcretism between Language and Object As a number of exhibitions reveal, Brazilian neoconcretism has been enjoying increased international popularity.1 At the end of the 1950s, this artistic movement sought to reassess European currents of constructivist and Concrete Art by reintroducing intuition and expression. Although it lasted only three years (1959–1961), the importance of the movement has not diminished today. British scholar Michael Asbury points out that it is “one of the key references within the current economy of legitimation of Brazilian contemporary art.”2 Yet he also asserts that the movement stays “contextually obscure.”3 Artists in Brazil turned to Concrete Art at the beginning of the 1950s, rigorously rejecting modernist figuration as a mode of creating stereotyped national folklore.4 Nevertheless, when neoconcretism surged at the end of the decade in Rio de Janeiro, art historians and critics often associated the movement with a local or even national re-inscription of art in Brazil. They operated within the confines of a discourse that could not escape the dichotomy of the centre-periphery axis at a moment when the international art world was becoming increasingly globalised. Today, such dichotomist thinking seems outdated, and yet it still remains a powerful reference when dealing with Brazilian art (see also Michael Asbury’s essay in this volume). Affiliated with concretism in general — often against the background of differences between artists working in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — neoconcretism was either regarded as a “Brazilian contribution”5 to concretism or as its “peak and rupture.”6 Yet the movement is still envisioned as an “important strategy for the production of Brazilian art in terms of conquering a broader autonomy when faced with dominant cultural models”7 and as a “local inflexion to the Constructivist project.”8 The art historian Luis Camilo Osorio even goes so far as to ascribe the movement to Rio de Janeiro’s peculiar “geography of hills and beaches that transformed historical … social injustice into a creative crossroads where formal rigor mingled with popular energy.”9 The “advantages of backwardness” are also often evoked as the key to understanding the creative change that neoconcretism brought about; in other words, the lack of modern institutions “led to the recognition of the social dimension of experiences; very different from the one conceived by the linear rationalism of various Constructivist movements.”10 The recent hype around neoconcretism is also mainly focused on two artists that participated in the movement: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Both were visual

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artists who started to explore the limits of art making through increasingly body-focused works, and both ultimately stopped making art altogether (Clark used her objects for therapy and Oiticica ended up doing what he called anti-art).11 The rather biographical focus on the specific trajectory of these two artists has, on the one hand, overshadowed the reception of neoconcretism in general and, on the other, led to an exoticised reception of their art. The understanding of neoconcretism as a national or culturally specific art movement and the focus on works with a body-centred approach seem to be implicitly written in order to guard against accusations of mimesis and belatedness and to link the art practice with identity politics. Yet this perspective rests on a dangerous assumption: when constructivist art in Brazil became focused on the process of making and on experiences that involved the body and senses other than eyesight, it was also “Brazilianised.” Against the background of “the Western valuation of seeing and hearing as primary senses for the production of rational knowledge and the keying of touch, smell, and taste as lower and ‘irrational,’”12 this assumption reaffirms for neoconcretism a status as “other.” Regardless of whether or not this is intentional on the part of those persons taking part in this discourse, it does not destabilise the categories of centre/periphery but merely shifts the category to focus on canon/other-but-equal-to-canon. As the German art historian Susanne Leeb points out, what is actually missing in these discourses is the analysis of “specific artistic forms of production that are based on complex practices, long histories and regional differentiations.”13 In the case of neoconcretism, the participative and body-centred aspect needs to be analysed from this perspective rather than relying once again on the examples of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Little attention has been paid, for instance, to the explicit interdisciplinary mode of working that is a hallmark of the neoconcrete movement. I will argue here that it was the collaboration between visual artists (initially Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape), sculptors (Franz Weissmann, Amilcar de Castro), and poets (Ferreira Gullar, Theon Spanudis, Reinaldo Jardim) that created a climate in which increasingly body-focused artworks were produced without leaving constructivist premises behind. In particular, the relationship between visual art and poetry, or writing in a broader sense, deserves a more detailed analysis because it was an essential interface that made a body-focused approach in neoconcrete art possible. Brazilian art historians, such as Lorenzo Mammì14 and Sergio Martins,15 have stated that the connection between Concrete Art and poetry is both singular in Brazil and a constitutive element of the constructivist tendencies in the country. Therefore it might not be a coincidence that the book became a preferred spatial medium of neoconcrete art practice. Later, artists also adopted other container-like entities such as caskets and boxes. In this essay I will analyse some of the interdisciplinary neoconcrete artworks in order to show how the combination of poetry/ text and visual art as well as the use of books and containers changed the notion of constructivist thought. The German art historian Katrin Ströbel affirms that a tendency towards the entanglement of different artistic categories can be identified since the beginning of

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the twentieth century. Writing and language, she asserts, are the cutting edge in this development and “become constituting components of many Avant-garde currents.”16 Referring to Wolfgang Max Faust’s 1977 definition of the “lingualisation of the arts,”17 Ströbel names dadaism, cubism, surrealism, pop, informel and conceptual art but, strikingly, omits Concrete and constructivist art. Concrete Poetry, by contrast, is examined in a completely separate chapter and is seen as an example of the approximation of literature and the visual arts. Still, she concludes that Concrete Poetry stays within the confines of language-immanent thinking,18 while the real effort of entangling the two art branches was made by the visual arts.19 In the neoconcrete movement this process was absolutely mutual, as poets and artists worked together and based their investigations on both the theoretic positions of constructivist art and on the philosophy of perception espoused by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ernst Cassirer, and Susanne Langer. The neoconcrete experiments used language to express form and vice versa. They focused on the place where signifier and signified meet––that is, on a sheet of paper, which acts as a surface, and the book, which acts as a three-dimensional container. For the founding members of neoconcretism, writing and visual art was entangled on a very practical level. Since none of them could live solely from making art, they all had so-called bread-and-butter jobs working as journalists or graphic designers at local periodicals. Their influence on the printed press became most visible when the Rio-based Jornal do Brasil created its cultural Sunday Supplement (SDJB) in 1956, which was so successful that the whole newspaper was restructured and turned into a serious news arbitrator.20 The SDJB was mainly led by members of neoconcretism, and thus it became the central organ of the movement’s divulgation. The poet Reinaldo Jardim became its editor, Amilcar de Castro was responsible for the majority of graphic renewals, and Ferreira Gullar published frequent essays about art in the SDJB. This affinity for language and design is also reflected in the references the artists made in their manifesto (“Manifesto Neoconcreto” 1959). The manifesto leaves no doubt that they were familiar with texts and works by artists such as Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Lazar El Lissitzky, and the Russian supremacist Kazimir Malevich. Malevich deserves particular mention in this context because of his opinions about the intersection of language and visual art, a notion that was caught up and played with by the neoconcrete artists as well. He also attached great importance to language as a medium of intervention: “For him painting, writing, thinking and being would have the same position and significance.”21 Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, in particular, created an extended text corpus along with their plastic work. The art historian Sérgio Bessa states that “Clark’s writings offer the rare opportunity to explore her visions based on the most lucid account of the processes that made them unfold.”22 Furthermore, according to art historian Frederico Coelho, the (re)discovery of Oiticica’s unpublished texts accounted for an essential change in the understanding of the artist.23 He noted that Oiticica’s oeuvre was not only visual, but also to a great extent textual. Many diverse text genres were found among the recovered pieces, including poetry, prose,

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translations of foreign poetry and prose, and literary critique.24 The artist even had plans to publish the texts in a book where he wanted to discuss “all the problems that haunted me since ‘59 in a more objective way.”25 The publication was never realised, which is due in part to the artist’s early death in 1980. As for visual art and poetry, Ferreira Gullar and Lygia Pape had the strongest connection between both genres in the neoconcrete movement. An analysis of both artists’ works can give us some insight as to how the neoconcrete experiments functioned between the arts, and how this paved the way for a reinterpretation of constructivist ideas. First, I will explore Gullar’s approximation to the visual arts; this will be followed, in a second step, by the reversal embodied in Lygia Pape’s works combining poetry and graphic art. Gullar was their theoretical voice — he wrote the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (1959) and the “Theory of the Non-Object” (1960) as well as numerous essays defending neoconcrete premises — and as a poet he experimented with the spatialisation of language, ultimately introducing a sense of touch into his works. Through a series of experiments Gullar narrowed the gap between Concrete Poetry and the visual arts until he concluded that he had reached an end point. In 1961 he even considered destroying all of his neoconcrete works. According to US-American art historian Mariola Alvarez, “this [Gullar’s] last foray into art production before completely abandoning Neoconcretism in 1961 remains ignored in the literature.”26 Indeed, literary studies usually focus on those works by Gullar that leave no doubt about their affiliation to the field of literature. As Ströbel has already identified, despite the recent turn to the visual, a real break with the literary traditions and a move towards a more interdisciplinary mode of approaching texts is still lacking.27 The continued ignorance about Gullar’s neoconcrete experiments in literary studies might be owing exactly to this dearth. Furthermore, Gullar’s own radical break with neoconcretism in 1961 fuelled the subsequent neglect of his neoconcrete works. Brazilian Concrete Poetry was the most internationally cross-linked artistic movement the country had ever seen. In fact, the very term is the result of a Brazilian-German decision, which was taken when the poet Décio Pignatari met Eugen Gomringer — then secretary of the Design School of Ulm in Germany.28 In Brazil, Concrete Poetry developed mainly in the two metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and had a strong connection to Concrete Art. Yet in São Paulo they were organised into two different groups: Noigandres for poets and Ruptura for artists; while the neoconcrete movement in Rio incorporated both artists and poets who even worked together on shared projects such as the Balé Neoconcreto I and II invented by Lygia Pape and Reinaldo Jardim. The Concrete poets conceived of the poem as a visual whole: Imagined as a gestaltic whole, the poem as a visual sign engages the reader like a street sign or an advertisement … an active, graphic object. Meaning lies on the surface.29

Yet Gullar noticed a crucial problem in this conception: the graphic reception of the poem as well as the word repetitions ultimately stopped the reader from reading. The reader was not able to simultaneously see the graphic object and capture

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Fig. 1: Lygia Pape, Poema-objeto, 1957/8, 21.5 × 21.5 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape

the meaning of the words through the reading process.30 This produced a major difference between the neoconcrete poets and the Noigandres poets in São Paulo, as the latter were convinced that it was necessary to completely exclude any semantic meaning of the words because they create duration.31 Therefore, in order to combine both — the perception of the semantic word sense and the graphic object — Gullar needed to reinvent the object instead. Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the non-object, published in the SDJB in 1960 in the context of the second neoconcrete exhibition, has been employed repeatedly to better understand neoconcrete artworks in general. However, this practice is problematic, particularly for the post-1960s works but also for the anterior ones, since not all artists identified with Gullar’s theory. Lygia Clark, for instance, rejected it from the beginning.32 Yet when speaking about Gullar’s own experiments, it does make sense to take a brief look at his theory. In his own words, the non-object is constituted as a “special object in which one intends the synthesis of sensory and mental experiences: a body that is transparent to phenomenological knowledge, integrally perceivable, that gives itself to perception without surplus. It is pure appearance.”33 The influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is clearly distinguishable in this concept. Gullar started to read Merleau-Ponty’s texts after the first neoconcrete exhibition in 1959.34 Yet the idea of an organic living object inherent in the notion of the non-object is already present in his earlier works, starting in 1957. Alvarez highlights that the specific difference from other Concrete Poetry and art was “how the object operated, what the object communicated and how it moved through the social space.”35

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Fig. 2: Lygia Pape, Poema luz, 1957, 41.5 × 54.5 cm, 41.7 × 54.2 cm, 40 × 70 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape

Neoconcrete artists were not the first to note that poetry without reading was no longer poetry. In 1951, the Italian artist Carlo Belloli was working with text-objects. He attached words or word groups to “transparent geometric figures such as balls, square-based pyramids or cubes” and called them corpi di poesia.36 Although the artist aligned himself with the futurist movement and was reluctant to accept his designation as a Concrete poet, his work anticipated Concrete Poetry and art37 and shows quite striking affinities to the neoconcrete movement. In particular, his rather radical opinion that “Concrete Poetry should not exclude the semantic level completely because the word semantics belong to the concretion of the linguistic material”38 is very similar to the neoconcretists’ way of working. Belloli also agreed with the idea that the reader should be integrated into the process of text building. And he even postulated that this process should happen in a “direct, almost bodily encounter with language as an object.”39 One early example of neoconcrete experimentation with this notion is Lygia Pape’s poema-objetos (Object-Poems, 1957/8) (fig. 1). These poems consist of cardboard cards, seldom bigger than 22 × 22 cm, which can be manipulated through moveable elements so that written words appear. Here, Pape takes the bodily encounter with language quite literally: spectators’ hands manipulate the “page” so that the graphic object — a word — appears. This process of revealing makes the

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spectator read the word again without ever sacrificing its graphic qualities. The interrelation of writing and form thus becomes a central topic for the artist. The temporalisation of the experience of form (through the process of manipulation) at the same time produces a temporal extension of the semantic experience of the written sign (word). By this means, Pape realises the neoconcrete understanding of form as a mobile synthesis of space and time in her Object-Poems. Space and time also play a crucial role in her poemas luz (Light-Poems, 1956/57) (fig. 2, pl. XII) where she used glass plates (later Plexiglas) painted with tempera colour with one plate of each poem (a conglomerate of coloured plates) containing one printed word (sendo, sono, em vão/being, sleep, in vain). The glass plates were hung from the ceiling on nylon strings in the exhibition space so that the light could penetrate them, and the partial overlapping of the plates created new colours for the spectator. Depending on the lighting conditions, the colours changed appearance and the plates produced shadows on the walls. Although the colours could be perceived from both sides and their overlapping and appearance depended on the spectator’s position, the words’ meaning was only revealed on one side. Form was highly mobile in this work and the only fixed objects that produced meaning seemed to be the words’ semantic structure. Yet the words Pape used for the Light-Poems were far from signifying objects in reality. On the contrary, she used words that connected to philosophical concepts (being), temporal states of being (sleep), and a non-defined action that is useless (in vain). These concepts are debatable and are as mobile in their meaning as are form and colour in the Light-Poems. Here, light becomes a metaphor for constant mobility in time and space — the mobility of the spectator who circles the work, the appearance of colours and forms, and the meaning of the words.

Books The book became a crucial object in Brazilian art during the neoconcrete movement, as the art historian Paulo Venancio Filho confirms.40 Both Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar worked with the book as an active object that converted the reader into a potential participant. This deployment of the book as a spatial entity for artistic activity was crucial to the neoconcrete understanding of constructivist ideas. Indeed, Frederico Coelho highlighted the transformative potential of the book as a medium of artistic action between literature and the visual arts: “As a physical object, space of aesthetic action and verbal creations, the book turns into a plain territory of subversion or adoration for those artists that transcend the demarcated limits of the literary and the visual field.”41 The Russian constructivists, to whom the neoconcretists refer in their manifesto, already saw the transformative potential of the book in the visual arts, and they converted it into a space “for radically different forms of expression in the visual arts, literature, theatre and architecture.”42 Gullar’s experiences with visual poetry and its limitations made him turn to the spatial entity of the book, which gives the neoconcrete object’s mode of operation

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Fig. 3: Ferreira Gullar, Livro-poema No. 3, 1957, 18.9 × 19 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAM/MinC

a new turn. Even closer to Belloli’s Text-Objects than Pape’s experiments, Gullar’s livro-poemas (Book-Poems) work with the reader as part of the wider text-building process. The works give crucial insights into the operative and communicative change that the neoconcrete object underwent. The Book-Poems contain only one word per page so that the reader must turn the page in order to discover the next word. In this way, the poem can no longer be perceived as a graphic object in one glimpse. The reader not only starts to read the words again but also takes part in the process of creation by turning the pages. The gesture of the reader’s action performs the word semantics. It is the third Book-Poem that “presents a new conception … because it did not have the structure of a book but of a new, touchable object.”43 In the Book-Poem fruta (Fruit) (fig. 3) Gullar even inserts geometric folds and cuts into the pages. The poem is a spatial-bodily experience of the word “fruta.” Through manual manipulation the reader performs the act of pealing a fruit when he/she turns the pages and unfolds the geometric shaped page-folds. Indeed, Gullar stated that he wanted “to materialise that sensation of opening fruit, through the use of an object.”44 According to the Brazilian art historian Ariel Jiménez, the process of fruta is analogous to nature as it is produced from the inside like a blossom.45 Only when the reader reaches the centre of the book does the word “fruta” actually appear; the semantic meaning of the word is only revealed through the reader’s gesture. Word semantics

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Fig. 4: Lygia Pape, Livro da criação, 1959, 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape Fig. 5: Lygia Pape, Luz, detail of Livro da criação, 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape

and object are in a constitutive relationship with one another and the word becomes a concrete bodily experience. In order to reintegrate word semantics into Concrete Poetry, Gullar needed a real object: the book. He also introduced a spatial and temporal component into his Book-Poems by stretching them not just over a single page, but over an entire book so that it can only be read within a certain

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timeframe. The book thus turns into an ideal object of folded space and requires time to unfold its content; in this sense, it also determines Gullar’s concept of timespace. The act of reading — the generation of meaning through the recognition of the semantic value of a sign — takes place through the body because the reading of a book possesses a haptic dimension in itself: the reader has to turn the pages with his or her hand. Gullar derives a participative power, later also seen in works by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, from his own experiments with the book: “In fact, the origin of spectator participation in the work could not have been more natural or simple: It came from the book, which is, by definition a palpable object.”46 In the first neoconcrete exhibition in 1959 at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro no other manipulable artworks were shown beyond Gullar’s Book-Poems. However, in its second iteration in Salvador de Bahía a few months later, Lygia Pape presented her livro da criação (Book of Creation). Pape created three different books throughout the active period of the neoconcrete movement, the above-mentioned Book of Creation (1959), the livro da arquitetura (Book of Architecture, 1959–60), and the livro do tempo (Book of Time, 1960–61). All three dealt with crucial neoconcretist topics, including space and time, creation and movement.47 The Book of Creation and the Book of Architecture functioned in a similar manner to usual books. They are formed by 30 × 30 cm cardboard pages without binding, and the pages are kept in a box and are to be withdrawn by a potential reader. Unlike pop-up books they do not unfold by themselves by opening a page. The pages first appear to be two-dimensional and require the reader’s manipulation to unfold into three-dimensional space like little paper sculptures. Unlike Gullar’s Book-Poems, Pape’s books do not contain any words. The Book of Creation (figs. 4 + 5, pl. XIII) alludes to the biblical Genesis and is narrated by geometrically abstract forms, but the reader is left to fill the pages according to his or her own imagination.48 In fact, due to the absence of text in the book, meaning is created only through the individual experience of the reader.49 The conception of the concrete that is inherent in this work is thus a process that marks the interaction of the reader with the book-object. This concept of concreteness is highly mobile. The artist states about her work: The first — basic — meaning arises that has led to the formation of the book: the existential experience of man confronting the forces of nature, water, fire, then the major cultural periods, inventions, etc. Being able to attach meaning to the book through the viewer’s contribution does not change its meaning, since the book is revealed to each person as novel and unique. … There is no historical intention of narrating more or less important facts, but rather, things that touch all humans in an existential or universal sense.50

The existential and the universal that Pape refers to here convene as much in myth as in the real human experience of worldly things. The experience of men and women who confront major natural forces is an abstract, mythical situation and is only realised through the reader/spectator’s handling of the pages, who thus re-ex-

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periences the confrontation with the forces that are constructing the event. This might remind one of the similarity between mythic and aesthetic space as conceptualised by Ernst Cassirer, a philosopher who was also read by participants in the neoconcrete movement.51 According to Cassirer, the mythic and the aesthetic space are a “real living space, build of the forces of pure feeling and phantasy.”52 Indeed, the difference between these two kinds of spaces (mythic and aesthetic) lies only in the greater distance between subject and object and help the latter to a more “independent existence.”53 In the Book of Creation, Pape overcomes this greater distance between object and its spectator by letting the spectator intervene in the object’s construction and thus create the mythic situation as a personal experience.

Boxes In 1959, Gullar created a series of spatial poems. Most of them consist of wooden quadratic plates with a small quadratic notch in the centre and a geometric figure on top (a cube, a pyramid etc. with quadratic base area). In order to “read” the poem, the reader has to lift the figure to reveal the poem — now only consisting of one single word — hidden underneath. The spatial poem não (No) (fig. 6) is made of a wooden quadratic box. The “reader” must swing open the black box and then remove a black plate (from a now white surrounding), which is shaped in a square that rests on one of its edges. He/ she then discovers that there is another red square underneath with the word não written in its centre. The reader’s role changes significantly in this process of concretion: like an archaeologist he/she excavates the word não, which is hidden by various layers. Colour and form become vehicles for the revelation of the semantic meaning of não, and they act upon the “reader’s” affectivity by means of visual and tactile impulses. The final layer, the red square that hides não, works like a stop sign. It creates a bodily experience of the word’s semantic concept. The spatial poem pássaro (Bird) (fig. 7a) functions in a similar way but acts on a more symbolic level. Made of a white box, its volume is separated by a white wooden plate in its centre. When this plate is withdrawn, it reveals another plate with the word pássaro written on it. Here, the poem is activated by the reader (fig. 7b), who performs an act of liberation (of the bird) on a symbolic level when extracting the plate that covers the word. In this poem the word semantic produces a concrete experience with an abstract situation. The experience of liberating a bird is enacted by means of physical intervention. Yet the liberated bird is only a sign that signifies any bird and thus creates an abstract situation. The young Hélio Oiticica, who joined the neoconcretists for their second exhibition, developed a preference for the box as medium of artistic expression at a point when the movement was already starting to dissolve. In fact, Oiticica was very disappointed when Ferreira Gullar did not want to continue with the movement. This perhaps explains why, to my mind, his bólides series seems to exist somewhere between his two main artistic periods: his neoconcrete phase and his

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Fig. 6: Ferreira Gullar, Poema espacial não, 1959/2004, Rio de Janeiro, 30 × 30 × 4 cm, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAN/MinC

involvement in socio-cultural issues after coming into contact with one of the biggest shantytowns in Rio. These trans-objects, as Oiticica defines them, not only mark a transition in the artist’s own creative process, but also give the object in Brazilian art a new meaning. Oiticica comes to the conclusion that objects should be perceived against the background of their existential status, which is intimately connected to its experience. Therefore, the artist uses the term trans-object (trans-objeto), which he borrowed from the art critic Mário Pedrosa. Pedrosa introduced this term in a discussion with Ferreira Gullar about the non-object. Because, in the visual arts, transcendence does not come from language — or at least not necessarily — but from the object, he invented the term trans-object in order to distinguish it from Gullar’s non-object.54 The trans-object does not move between mental and sensorial perception like the non-object, but instead between the real and the perceived world. Oiticica applies the term to both his own and to the spectator’s experience with the object. The bólides, which are also trans-objects, are meant to integrate the quotidian into an aesthetic idea. He calls this process “objectification,” which “occurs in a direct and metaphorical way” when an object is “transported from the world of things to the plane of symbolic forms.”55

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Fig. 7a + b: Ferreira Gullar, Poema espacial passaro, 1959/2004, 30 × 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAN/MinC

The bólides can be divided into two groups, the bólides vidro (Glass-Bolides) and the bólides caixas (Box-Bolides). Mostly in red, yellow, and orange, the Box-Bolides invite the spectator to open and reach into them. They distinguish themselves from Gullar’s spatial poems because they reveal the brushwork and appear rougher in their general conception. Oiticica was interested in the object properties ascribed to the bólides in their everyday life, and thus he had a more playful access to them. He stated that he felt “like a child who begins to experiment with objects in order to understand their qualities.”56 The bólide I want to discuss here also contains text. According to Frederico Coelho, the bólides indicate an increasing text heaviness in Oiticica’s oeuvre in general.57 The bólides caixa 17 (poema caixa, 1966) is a quadratic box that has four sides stringed with burlap and painted in a different colour (blue, red, yellow, black and white). On the inside there is a plastic bag with blue pigment powder sealed inside. When one tries to take the bag out, a plastic ribbon extends with a poem written on it: “from my blood/ from my sweat/ this love will live” (do meu sangue/ do meu suor/este amor viverá). The poem is a reference to Oiticica’s experiences in the shantytown Mangueira,58 which he began to frequent after 1964. The tactile intervention with the material becomes an integral part of the process of text cognition. Contrary to Gullar’s spatial poems, where form and colour help to experience the word semantic, Oiticica’s poem intensifies the colour and form experience. The words do not work as concepts but connect to the material in their metaphoric power. They put the reader into a melancholic, sad, “blue” state, which is communicated through the blue colour pigment. The poem speaks of two body flu-

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ids — blood and sweat — and the colours of the plastic bag work to activate the spectator/reader’s association with the body: the yellow letters — sweat; the red box — blood. Oiticica refers repeatedly to Piet Mondrian in his texts, declaring him a to be a “great prophet” of abstract and constructivist art.59 Like Mondrian, in bólide 17 he only uses primary colours, but he encodes them with a body-based order. This opens the constructivist-concrete concept up to include a bodily-tactile perspective that works on both conceptual and real levels.

Conclusion An affinity for language, books, and boxes as material entities can be traced to this day in Brazilian art. In fact, a recent exhibition has dealt specifically with this topic (Pinacoteca, São Paulo 2012). Furthermore, the British art critic and historian Guy Brett has posed a reasonable question about this peculiar affinity: Why, when they were concerned with projecting art out of the gallery and museum into life-situations were Brazilian artists of the avant-garde so interested in these restricted and contained vehicles with their association with the library and the archive?60

There are two points to consider when attempting to answer this question in relation to the neoconcrete movement: First, it would be an unfair attribution to say that neoconcrete artists were all and from the beginning of the movement’s existence interested in projecting art outside of the museum. Second, the association of books with libraries and archives is a very European point of view. Neoconcretism started as a completely institutionalised movement. The first neoconcrete exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and the abstract avant-gardes were anything but critical of Brazil’s still young art institutions. Rather, these institutions functioned as catalysts for the artists’ formation and international promotion. The increasing projection of neoconcrete art outside of the museum came from the artworks themselves. The integration of spectator participation in the touchable and manipulable works automatically posed questions about the modes of presentation. In fact, the neoconcrete artists had an ambiguous attitude towards where their experiments would lead and what they might eventually imply. Lygia Pape stated that it was painful for her to see that the Book of Creation was becoming tattered in the hands of people manipulating it, especially since she had produced only a single copy. So much so that she considered making replicas or prototypes for future exhibitions in a more durable material.61 For the neoconcrete exhibition in 1960 she resolved the confrontation with the white cube in a different way by photographing each page separately within the cityscape of Rio de Janeiro. The photos not only introduced new elements into the work, such as the lighting conditions in the city, they also formed the documentation of the first work. Eight years later, when the artist turned to the medium of film, she produced a film about

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the Book of Creation. The strip shows hands manipulating the pages and an offvoice reads the text the artist wrote for the Book’s presentation at the opening of the second neoconcrete exhibition, which retells the Genesis story in a poetic way. Ironically, the problem of the Book of Creation’s interactivity is also a problem of space-time — a central concern of the neoconcrete movement. Interactivity calls for a certain moment and a certain place. From a historical point of view, what remains is only documentation and myth: an untouchable object, a story about the “performance” at the show opening in 1960, and documentation material (photos and films) of its original use. In 1961, when the group of neoconcrete artists dissolved, Ferreira Gullar left Rio to work at the Fundação Cultural de Brasilia and at the same time distanced himself from the avant-garde’s claims. He came to the radical conclusion that neoconcrete experiments had reached a dead end, and he proposed to Hélio Oiticica that they stage one last hour-long show that would end with an explosion to destroy all the works. This never occurred, primarily because Oiticica and his colleagues would not agree. Yet the ambiguous status of Gullar’s Object-Poems is still in effect today, as they are sold as fine art pieces in a gallery. Although Hélio Oiticica became famous for the materially ephemeral works he created in the late 1960s and 70s––which he called propositions leaving objecthood behind––this was not always his position. In 1960, when he created a series of bilaterais brancos (White Bilaterals), he wrote: “White above, white below; I would like to see a painting of mine in an empty, completely light-grey room. Only there do I believe it might exist fully.”62 Throughout his entire life he was deeply concerned with the preservation of his works, not so much in the material sense but on the basis of his ideas. He left detailed sketches of his works (or propositions) and descriptions of how to build and even install them in the exhibition space.63 But why books and boxes? Guy Brett offers the explanation that the use of these entities represented a wish for order and a way to confront the “permanent chaos” that Brazilian living conditions brought about.64 This argument draws on positions in Brazilian art criticism65 concerning the constructivist tendencies in the country or even on the whole subcontinent.66 Yet from the point of view of Brazilian art critics, it had a political or rather ideological connotation: the “constructive will” was seen as an expression and vital part of a society still in construction.67 Leaving behind the ideological implications of Brett’s argumentation, one is quickly led back to precisely the cultural inscription of neoconcretism that I am trying to contest in this essay. This becomes clear, when the gaze is turned around. Would (or could) we state that the Swiss-German Concrete Art movement in the 1950s emerged from the desire to reconstruct post-war Germany and confront the chaos and ruins the Second World War had left in its wake? Certainly, similarities can be found in the two countries’ 1950s experience: while Germany was experiencing its economic miracle, Brazil saw a period of accelerated modernisation combined with a utopian spirit. Yet a local perspective on the use of books and boxes that argues from a cultural point of view, in my opinion, should take serious note of the status that books held in 1950s Brazilian society.

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Books in Brazil were not so much associated with the archive or the library. These institutions in Latin America have a strong colonial bias — the collection and archiving of knowledge and artefacts served as a crucial means of exercising power over colonised people. Furthermore, Brazil’s history of archiving is still young and practices of preservation are as yet (con)tested. However, the book also has a handy format, and it is no coincidence that most neoconcrete artworks are rather small in size (Hélio Oiticica is the obvious exception). They were low-budget productions created at a moment when artists could not live from their art in Brazil because an art market was practically non-existent. Books and boxes were not restricted and self-contained; on the contrary, they were open and flexible precisely because they were highly mobile (easy to handle, low-cost, and of variable use).

Notes 1 Hot Spots: Rio de Janeiro, Milan-Turin, Los Angeles, 1956–1969, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2008; Time & Place: Rio de Janeiro 1956–1964, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2008; Neoconcrete Experience, Gallery 32, Embassy of Brazil, London 2009–2010; Das Verlangen nach Form — O Desejo da Forma. Neoconcretismo und zeitgenössische Kunst aus Brasilien, Akademie der Künste, Berlin 2011; Playing with Form: Neoconcrete Art from Brazil, Dickinson Roundell, New York, 2011. 2 Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism. On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-Object” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Iniva, 2005), 168–189, here 174. 3 Ibid. 4 Ferreira Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with/en conversación con Ariel Jiménez (New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2012), 31. 5 Ferreira Gullar, “Arte neoconcreta. Uma contribuição brasileira” in Projeto construtivo brasileiro na arte (1950–1962), ed. Aracy A. Amaral (São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estadio; Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna, 1977), 114–129; Ronaldo Brito, “Towards a Distinction Between Concretismo and Neoconcretismo” in Das Verlangen nach Form — O Desejo da Forma. Neoconcretismo und zeitgenössische Kunst aus Brasilien, ed. Robert Kudielka, Angela Lammert, and Luiz Camillo Osorio, exhibition catalogue Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2010), 241–246. 6 Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretismo. Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 1975). 7 Brito, “Towards a Distinction Between Concretismo and Neoconcretismo” (cf. note 5), 241–246, here 241. 8 Luiz Camillo Osorio, “The Desire of Form and the Forms of Desire: Neoconcretism as a Unique Contribution of Brazilian Art” in Das Verlangen nach Form (cf. note 5), 226–234, here 227. 9 Ibid., 231. 10 Rodrigo Naves, “Bending Method. Neoconcretism and Brazilian Art” in Das Verlangen nach Form (cf. note 5), 247–251, here 249. 11 Oiticica coined the term anti-art in relation to participative art as “optimism, … creation of a new vitality in the human experience; its main objective is to give the public a chance to cease being an outside, viewing public in order to become a participant in the creative activity.” Hélio Oiticica, “Position and Program (July 1966)” in Hélio Oiticica. The Great Labyrinth, ed. Museum für Moderne Kunst, Susanne Gaensheimer, Peter Gorschlüter, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, and César Oiticica Filho, exhibition catalogue Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 169–177, here 176. Strikingly, he also refers to the art critic Mário Pedrosa’s formulation of postmodern art, stating that this conception of postmodern art equals his own conception of anti-art.

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12 “Introduction” in Sensible Objects. Colonialism, Museum and Material Culture, ed. Elisabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Philips (New York: Berg, 2006), 7. 13 Susanne Leeb, “Weltkunstgeschichte und Universalismusbegriffe: 1900/2010,” Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 2 (2012), 13–25, here 18. 14 Lorenzo Mammì, “Concreta ’56: The Root of Form (a Reconstruction of the I National Exhibition of Concrete Art)” in Concret ’56: The Root of Form, exhibition catalogue Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2006), 22–51, here 28. 15 Sergio Martins, Constructing an Avant-garde. Art in Brazil (1949–1979) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 31. 16 Katrin Ströbel, Wortreiche Bilder. Zum Verhältnis von Text und Bild in der zeitgenössischen Kunst (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 12. 17 The expression “lingualisation” was coined by Wolfgang Max Faust and refers to different possible ways to connect language and art: “its [language’s] integration into an artwork, its use as a medium for art making, its use next to the artwork.” Author’s translation. Original text: “Ihre Einbeziehung ins Kunstwerk, ihre Verwendung als Medium der bildenden Kunst, ihre Benutzung neben dem Werk.” Wolfgang Max Faust, Bilder werden Worte. Zum Verhältnis von bildender Kunst und Literatur. Vom Kubismus bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne: Du Mont, 1987), 15. 18 Ströbel, Wortreiche Bilder (cf. note 16), 30. 19 Ibid., 25–27. 20 Mariola Alvarez, Neoconcretism and the Making of Brazilian National Culture, 1954–61 (PhD dissertation, Univ. of California San Diego, 2012), 120. 21 Kornelia Röder, “The Book as a Medium for the Russian Constructivist Avant-garde” in Von Kandinsky bis Tatlin: Konstruktivismus in Europa, ed. Kornelia Bersworth-Wallrabe and Gerhard Graulich, exhibition catalogue Staatliches Museum Schwerin (Schwerin: Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 2006), 141–168, here 148. 22 Antonio Sergio Bessa, “Word-Drool: The Constructive Secretions of Lygia Clark” in Lygia Clark. The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 300–305, here 301. 23 The Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the Itaú Cultural realised a project of digitalisation that made nearly all of Oiticica’s texts accessible online at itaucultural.org.br/programaho/ (last accessed 4 August 2016). 24 Frederico Coelho, Livro ou Livro-me. Os escritos babilônicos de Hélio Oiticica (1971–1978) (Rio de Janeiro: eduerj, 2010), 13. 25 Hélio Oiticica, Letter to Lygia Clark, 26 October 1971, Projeto HO # 0855.71, unpaginated. 26 Alvarez, Neoconcretism and the Making of Brazilian National Culture (cf. note 20), 71. 27 Ströbel, Wortreiche Bilder (cf. note 16), 30. 28 Eva Maltrovsky, Die Lust am Text in der bildenden Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004), 106. 29 Alvarez, Neoconcretism and the Making of Brazilian National Culture (cf. note 20), 78. 30 Ferreira Gullar, Experiência Neoconcreta: momento-limite da arte (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2007), 123. 31 Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation (cf. note 4), 35. 32 Fundació Antoni Tàpies, ed., Lygia Clark, exhibition catalogue Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 139. 33 Gullar, Experiência Neoconcreta (cf. note 30), 142. 34 Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation (cf. note 4), 69. 35 Alvarez, Neoconcretism and the Making of Brazilian National Culture (cf. note 20), 76. 36 Maltrovsky, Die Lust am Text in der bildenden Kunst (cf. note 28), 104. 37 Ibid., 104–106. 38 Ibid. 39 Christina Weiss, Seh-Texte. Zur Erweiterung des Textbegriffs in konkreten und nach-konkreten visuellen Texten (Zirndorf: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 1984), 62. 40 Paulo Venancio Filho, “The Recreation of the Book” in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space, ed. MNCARS Publications Department, exhibition catalogue Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid: Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011), 217–224, here 217. 41 Author’s translation. Original text: “Objeto físico, espaço de ação estética e de criação verbal, o livro se torna um território pleno de subervsão ou adoração por parte de artistas que transcendem

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os limites demarcados entre o campo literário e o compo visual.” Coelho, Livro ou Livro-me (cf. note 24), 189. Röder, “The Book as a Medium” (cf. note 21), 141. Gullar, Experiência Neoconcreta (cf. note 30), 37. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation (cf. note 4), 72. Ibid., 76. Gullar, Experiência Neoconcreta (cf. note 30), 127. Filho, “The Recreation of the Book” (cf. note 40), 218. Lygia Pape, Entrevista a Lúcio Carneiro e Ileana Pradilla (Rio de Janeiro: Lacerda Ed./Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1998), 31. Denise Mattar, Lygia Pape (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2003), 68. Lygia Pape, “Poems-Invention” in MNCARS Publications Department, Lygia Pape (cf. note 40), 178–179, here 179. Pape also studied aesthetic philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Ernst Cassirer, “Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum (1931)” in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 485–500, here 490. Ibid., 490. Lygia Clark, “1960” in Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Lygia Clark (cf. note 32), 142. Hélio Oiticica, “Bólides (October 29, 196)” in Hélio Oiticica (cf. note 11), 147–150, here 147. Hélio Oiticica, “Notebook Entry on Bólides (September 19, 1963)” in Hélio Oiticica (cf. note 11), 145–146, here 145. Coelho, Livro ou Livro-me (cf. note 24), 193. Favelas are the shantytowns that usually surround the metropolises. Rio de Janeiro has shantytowns at various places in the middle of the city due to the high inclination of the hills on which the city is built. Mangueira is still famous for its Samba School. Hélio Oiticica, “16. Februar 1961” in Hélio Oiticica (cf. note 11), 76–78, here 77. Guy Brett, “Rough Guide to the Terrain” in Aberto Fechado: Caixa e livro na arte brasileira, exhibition catalogue Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado, 2012), 10–54, here 10. Mattar, Lygia Pape (cf. note 49), 69. Hélio Oiticica, “Maio de 1960” in Hélio Oiticica: A Pintura depois do quadro, ed. Silvia Roesler (Rio de Janeiro: Silvia Roesler Edições de Arte, 2008), 78. In 2009 the storage space containing Oiticica’s work caught fire and destroyed a great number of works. The fire nourished the myth about original and copy that still surrounds the artist’s oeuvre. It is still not completely clear how many works were destroyed, and the Projeto Hélio Oiticica continues to make ambiguous statements about the originality of works. Although this is in keeping with Oiticica’s sensibility, it is nonetheless a continuing difficulty for the art market and for exhibition practices. Brett, “Rough Guide to the Terrain” (cf. note 60), 10. Roberto Pontual, “Brasil: as possíveis geometrias” in Arte Agora III / América Latina: Geometría sensível, ed. Roberto Pontual (Rio de Janeiro: Jornal do Brasil LTDA, 1978), 51–76. Frederico Morais, “A vocação construtiva da arte latino-americana (mas o caos permanece)” in Arte Agora III/América Latina: Geometría sensível (cf. note 66), 13–29. Ibid., 13.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Lygia Pape, Poema-objeto, 1957/8, tempera on cardboard, 21.5 × 21.5 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape (reproduced from: MNCARS Publications Department, Lygia Pape [cf. note 40], 196). Fig. 2: Lygia Pape, Poema luz, 1957, tempera on acrylic, 3 pieces: 41.5 × 54.5 cm, 41.7 × 54.2 cm, 40 × 70 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape (reproduced from: MNCARS Publications Department, Lygia Pape [cf. note 40], 195).

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Fig. 3: Ferreira Gullar, Livro-poema No. 3, 1957, offset print on paper, 18.9 × 19 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAM/MinC (reproduced from: Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation [cf. note 4], 74). Fig. 4: Lygia Pape, Livro da criação, 1959, gouache on cardboard, 18 elements, 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Lygia Pape (reproduced from: MNCARS Publications Department, Lygia Pape [cf. note 40], 228). Fig. 5: Lygia Pape, Luz, Livro da criação (detail), tempera and colour board, 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Projecto Lygia Pape, photo: Paula Pape (reproduced from: Mari Carmen Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2007, 360). Fig. 6: Ferreira Gullar, Poema espacial não, 1959/2004, acrylic on wood, 30 × 30 × 4 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAN/MinC (reproduced from: Kudielka, Lammert and Osorio, Das Verlangen nach Form [cf. note 5], 104). Fig. 7a: Ferreira Gullar, Poema espacial passaro, 1959/2004, acrylic on wood, 30 × 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAN/MinC (reproduced from: Gullar, Experiência Neoconcreta [cf. note 30], 53). Fig. 7b: Ferreira Gullar, Poema espacial passaro (detail), 1959/2004, acrylic on wood, 30 × 30 × 30 cm, Rio de Janeiro, Acervo Paço Imperial–Centro Cultural do IPHAN/MinC (reproduced from: Gullar, Experiência Neoconcreta [cf. note 30], 55).

BIRGIT HOPFENER

Intervention Is the Answer, but What Are the Questions? Developing Criteria for a Critical Examination of Qiu Zhijie’s Interventionist Project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Socially and politically engaged art practices and discourses seem to be the new universal language in contemporary art.1 Despite the global relevance that socially engaged art obviously has, discourses of interventionist, collaborative, and participatory art are still dominantly rooted in Euro-American art histories, in critical discussions of the modern Western binary structure of art versus life, and in the concept of “aesthetic autonomy.”2 A transcultural discourse that re-thinks and re-evaluates these frameworks and takes into account the multiple socio-political, historical, and epistemological conditions, structures, and motivations of how and why art is conceptualized as intervening into reality has only just begun to be formulated.3 In this essay, Qiu Zhijie’s (邱志杰) project, A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (南京长江大桥自杀者干预计划一) (since 2008) — a paradigmatic example of this artist’s concept of Total Art (Zongti yishu 总体艺术) — serves as a case study for the transcultural discourse of interventionist art. Based on analyses of A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge and of the concept of Total Art this article will aim to show how Qiu Zhijie de-centres and provincializes4 dominant Euro-American narratives. It will be examined how, in this regard, he rethinks and re-evaluates the binary epistemological model of art’s relationship to life and art’s social and critical functions, and how he constructs an entangled history of socially engaged art from his subjective transcultural perspective. On the other hand, this essay also seeks to disclose how the artist critiques Chinese social and cultural histories and exposes their underlying assumption about the interrelational epistemological structure of art and life. In the context of his own understanding and practice of Total Art, Qiu Zhijie relates his critique to the three worldviews that have formed Chinese art and cultural history, namely Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. In the present article the focus will be on Confucianism. I will examine how Qiu Zhijie critiques the longue durée of a hierarchical social order that is rooted in Confucianism and its related ethical assumptions, by appropriating and re-thinking the traditional Confucian concepts of “self-cultivation” and the educational ideal of “comprehensive understanding” or guantong [贯 通].5 It is in this regard that the paper shall critically reflect on why Total Art sees

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the efficiency and emancipatory potential attributed to critical and social interventions into reality as existential.

A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge: To Be Alive Means to Be Emancipated Qiu Zhijie’s art project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, as the monumental hand-drawn conceptual and topographically informed Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project (2012) (fig. 1) discloses, conceives of the Nanjing Bridge as an embodiment of contemporary China’s socially and historically constructed reality. The map depicts the bridge in aerial perspective and shows it spanning from China’s socialist history to the right through to its capitalist present on the left. Written expressions such as “train of capital,” “speed,” “promise of wealth,” or “urbanization” visualize contemporary China’s strong market orientation, and words such as “destroyed countryside” and “migrant workers” allude to the negative social effects of the dominant neo-liberal ideology. On the right-hand side of the bridge the expressions “the monument of national independence,” “monument of revolution,” or “monument of martyrs” position the bridge in relation to socialist history and socialist ideology, while “promise of communism,” “personality cult,” “political mobilization,” “collective labour,” “self-criticism,” or “uniform” illustrate the aspects and effects of socialism. The Nanjing River Yangtze Bridge is one of the most famous national symbols of the People’s Republic of China. Built during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) without foreign help or expertise, it became a symbol of the successful and glorious socialist future. During the period of Mao Zedong’s leadership (1949−1976) the Nanjing Bridge was omnipresent in the official visual culture of China; it appeared, for example, on official documents such as diploma certificates or stamps. However, more recently the Nanjing Bridge has become infamous as a popular suicide site. 6 As the art critic Zhu Zhu has noted, “these suicides form a micro-history that stands in sharp contrast to the official narrative of increasing prosperity and progressive socialism.”7 Referring to this contemporary social reality, the Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project not only visualizes the social and historical constructed-ness of the Nanjing Bridge and China respectively, but also the effects of subjectification, which, as becomes evident through the multiple suicides now taking place at the site, are obviously diagnosed as effects of de-subjectification. The map moreover visualizes various life-saving methods that encompass Qiu Zhijie’s artistic approaches as well as the social interventions made by “Soul Inn,” the local NGO for suicide prevention. All the methods visualized in the map share a common aim, which is to change the present reality of the bridge––and, by extension, of China––and its effects on human-subjects. In this context, by emphasizing art’s function of heightening the recipient’s awareness that reality, as much as oneself, is historically and socially constructed and therefore transformable, artworks are conceived as interventions into life.

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Fig. 1: Qiu Zhijie, Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project, 2012, c. 7 m length, Rotterdam, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

The Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project illustrates particularly well how the multiple works encompassed in the paradigmatic Total Art project known as A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge follow Total Art’s interventionist agenda and in this regard are conceived as vehicles for transformational and emancipatory self-technique or self-cultivation. All works, including drawings (such as the Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project), installations, videos, photography, performances, and frottages, on display in the exhibition context, as well as the site-specific artistic and social interventions on the Nanjing Bridge, not only critically examine, but also, by constructing new, reality-constituting interrelations, intervene in existent social and historical structures. Through insights into the transformability of reality and by learning about potential alternative constitutions of reality and one’s self, the viewer is engaged in critical self-reflection about his/her own social, historical, and psychological interrelatedness and constructedness. This function of Total Art as a self-technique comes to a head in site-specific interventions, since it is here that art as an emancipatory, deconstructive, and at the same time re-constructive practice, is expected to, quite literally, take on a human-subject-saving function, namely suicide prevention. The work Where Is the Capital of Madagascar? (2008),8 which is part of the longterm Nanjing Bridge Project illustrates how, in the context of Total Art, the critical function of art intervening into reality is conceived as an existential matter. Conceptualized as an interventionist mode of self-technique, or self-cultivation, Where

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Fig. 2: Qiu Zhijie, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, 2008, Shanghai, Zendai Museum of Modern Art

Is the Capital of Madagascar? not only encompasses an intervention on the bridge, which through its site-specificity immediately assumes life-saving connotations, but also in the exhibition context, which seeks to engage the viewer in self-critical and self-transforming processes. The point of departure for Where Is the Capital of Madagascar? is one of the multiple inscriptions written on the balustrade of the Nanjing Bridge, possibly by a suicidal person. In a performative intervention, Qiu Zhijie wiped off the second half of the last words, which were supposedly written in blood, in order to substitute them with his own. The artist described the overwriting of the original message, an articulation of devastating love-sickness: “Love is dead. All that [is] left is void,” with the phrase “Where is the capital of Madagascar?” (当爱烟消云散，我 剩下的只有忘情。马达加斯加的首都在哪里) as a psychological intervention.9 When confronted with a question, which, due to its lack of both a meaningful context and coherence with the original message, is conceived as (non)sense, the reader of Qiu Zhijie’s phrase, according to Johnson Chang, is being asked to pause and to reflect, to change perspective and to literally widen her/his horizons by directing his/her thoughts to the geographically distant island of Madagascar.10 In the exhibition space the audience learns about this intervention through photographs of the inscriptions (figs. 2 + 3) and a video-documentation of the performance presented on a TV screen. Moreover, the situation on the bridge is re-staged through an installative situation that engages the audience on the experiential level:

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Fig. 3: Qiu Zhijie, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, 2008, Zendai Museum of Modern Art

Fig. 4: Qiu Zhijie, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, 2008, Shanghai, Zendai Museum of Modern Art

While passing through the installation Don’t Lean upon a Balustrade (2008), a large, accessible wooden bridge structure11 also on display in the exhibition, visitors are confronted with monumental copies of the original inscription and of Qiu Zhijie’s overwriting on opposite walls (fig. 4). Where Is the Capital of Madagascar? asks recipients to intervene and to critically reflect; in other words, to transform their assumed inter-relational, socially and historically constructed reality, not excluding the self as a constituent of this reality. Where Is the Capital of Madagascar? epitomizes Total Art’s concern with emancipating its subjects by ascribing a life-saving––or subject-saving––function to interventionist art.

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Total Art: An Interventionist Art Practice The concept of Total Art is based on the assumption that everything in the world, including one’s self-subjectivity, is socially constructed, which in turn means that it is through social relations that everything is connected and mutually constitutive. Qiu Zhijie states: “No human being can exist beyond social consciousness and thought, which is also why no art object can exist beyond the social.”12 It is in this context that art, according to a Total Art perspective, is not conceived as external to but rather as a constitutive aspect of reality: “From the point of view of Total Art, every object, every person, and every event is intimately tied to the entirety of the world, as a mutual constitution. Consequently, this is called Total Art. Ultimately, Total Art is the means by which human beings and the world evolve.”13 According to Qiu Zhijie, all our thoughts and sentiments are formed through concrete historical, political, cultural, and social conditions, and vice versa. It is for this reason that he conceptualizes intervention and participation beyond the binary relationship of art and reality. The terms participation and intervention assume that the subject is an outsider who keeps himself out of affairs. But if you are already a participant, if you already “cross the river in the same boat” [that means if you are already in the same situation, share the same interests], to talk about how to participate and intervene isn’t necessary. Instead we should think about how to have an impact on the situation. It is against this background that it is necessary to describe the relationship between art and the reality anew. We are already in the social reality so we don’t have to discuss participation or intervention. In an extreme sense, all the most inner feelings and the most profound ideas that we have are interrelated with specific historical, political and economic situations as well as with our level of education, class and other social factors. Every step of the construction of an artwork, from its conception, to its materialization, its collection, its display in the exhibition system and its critical examinations is closely related with the social reality. It is in this sense that there is no artwork, which isn’t intervening or participating in reality.14

On the one hand, the term Total Art describes this totality of an assumed interrelated structure of social reality. On the other hand, it relates to the larger conceptual agenda of Total Art where freedom is the declared aim.15 In order to achieve freedom, the emancipatory practice of Total Art appropriates and takes advantage of the logic of total interrelatedness and the assumed constructedness of reality by questioning existent interrelations and creating new ones. Qiu Zhijie conceptualizes this critical interrelating practice of Total Art as interventionist: We are already in the midst of a social reality; each of our connections is intimately interwoven with social reality. In this extreme sense, one could say that there is no art that does not intervene or participate [in social reality] …16

Owed to the described topology of a socially interrelated and mutually constitutive world, Qiu Zhijie conceives intervention not only as an inevitable condition for art but also for life and for human beings: “How can one not intervene? In fact, one is intervening as long as one lives.”17

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It is against this background of an assumed interrelated structure of art and reality that Qiu Zhijie’s concept of intervention (jieru) questions the conventional concept of intervention, which is based on the modern Western avant-garde logic of spatial and temporal duality.18 While the latter intervenes into social reality from an assumed outside realm of art and breaks with the past in order to develop transformative effects, Qiu Zhijie’s concept of intervention is based on the assumption of a totally interconnected spatial and temporal immanence. Intervention here means to examine existent interrelations and to create new ones in order to transform reality and oneself: Because it [art] emerges from within the system, its ultimate aim is to return to the system, to change it. Thus it has social character. Effective art creation is at the same time a form of social critique. As its aim is to transform the system, it must be interwoven with everyday life even as art is other than everyday life. Art must transform 19 life.

This article argues that A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge epitomizes Total Art’s belief in the interventionist condition of art and life; in other words, the notion that because art is a constituent of life it is therefore always necessarily intervening in it. The project’s claim is that continuing one’s life can be read metaphorically as a demand to keep on intervening––that is, to constitute oneself as an emancipated subject by critically interrelating with reality.

Guantong Yishu To better grasp and describe his concept of interrelational Total Art interventions, Qiu Zhijie has coined the alternative Chinese term Guantong Yishu. Guantong (贯 通), which means “comprehensive understanding,”20 is a central term in Chinese cultural histories of learning and apprehending the world. 21 In order to better understand Qiu Zhijie’s contemporary appropriation of guantong, a historical excursus into the concept is necessary. Literally translated, guantong means “the thread that runs through things,” which as a metaphor, according to Antonio S. Cua, “… intimates the idea that understanding consists in having an insight into the interconnection of all things.”22 It is in this regard that guantong does not refer to an understanding of specific content, but instead to achieving insights into interconnections. In Chinese cultural history, guantong plays a particularly prominent role in the context of the Neo-Confucian23agenda of “self-cultivation.”24 In the context of self-cultivation (i.e. the moral and spiritual process of becoming a moral human being) guantong was not conceived as an end in itself but had further ethical implications. Guantong expressed the Neo-Confucian educational ideal of comprehensive understanding through investigations of reality to the utmost. And reality, according to the Neo-Confucian metaphysical worldview, was constituted through the universal principle li (理).

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The Neo-Confucian regarding the existence of principle was simple: there is a reason why all things are as they are. Because every object, relationship, and political interaction can also have a reason for why it is as it is, the notion of principle exists even in the universe. The pattern, or web, of principles underlying things and events constitutes a coherent and orderly whole, and that order in the cosmos is shared because all things have principles, while principle is one, its manifestations are many.25

Li is a twofold principle. According to the influential Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) philosophy,26 “the ultimate moral principle li and the metaphysical li/taiji … are identical; they are the Heavenly Way or Heavenly Principle as well as being virtue and moral principle of humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and faithfulness in the Neo-Confucian metaphysics.”27 It is in this regard that nature and morality were understood as tightly entangled, that investigations of reality were assumed to be moral endeavours at all times, and that learning was seen to serve moral growth. Exactly how self-cultivation should be conducted was explained and outlined in the Great Learning (Da Xue). The Great Learning is one of the Four Books that Zhu Xi commented on and declared to be canonical for the Neo-Confucian discourse.28 According to the Great Learning, the process of self-cultivation encompasses eight steps. While the first five steps were focused on personal cultivation, the last three aimed at the achievement of good government from the micro to the macro level, from regulating the family, to ordering the state, and finally bringing peace to all.29 As the following comment by Zhu Xi shows, guantong was conceived as the cumulative summit of this process, which was only achieved after the first two steps of the eight-step process of self-cultivation: “to recognize (investigate) things and affairs” ge wu (格物) and to “extend one’s knowing” zhi zhi (致知). He wrote: After exerting himself [in understanding physical and moral principle] for a long time, the individual will one day experience a breakthrough to integral comprehension [guantong]. The qualities of all things, whether internal or external, refined or coarse, will be apprehended and the mind … will all be clearly manifested.30

It is through the first steps of self-cultivation that one aims to systematically gain access to the moral and metaphysical principle li. Guantong, in this regard, means to achieve insight into the interrelations between the natural––that is, the metaphysical and moral realities––and their shared universal order, and it pursues the aim of bringing different knowledge and systems of knowledge into coherence according to li. Ensuring the continuity of history through self-cultivation has played a crucial role in Confucianism and in Neo-Confucianism. Therefore, the study of the ancient classics and the practice of calligraphy were seen as important modes of self-cultivation. Keeping in mind that the ancestral authors and editors of the Four Books and the Five Classics were believed to have achieved unification with the universal principle li, it was assumed that these publications revealed the metaphysical principles of the world.31 Through calligraphic practice the artist as well as the recipient of calligraphic artworks inscribed him-/herself into a certain narrative of

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artistic, intellectual, and moral history and by so doing contributed to the continuity of a certain canon.32 The Neo-Confucian concept of self-cultivation was based on a positive conception of humans. It was believed that through self-cultivation one could gain access to his/her own innate goodness,33 which in turn served as the pre-condition for the achievement of social harmony, the declared aim of self-cultivation. One cultivated oneself in interrelation with civil conduct and according to Neo-Confucian social and political order, which was constituted through the moral and metaphysical principle li. The process of self-cultivation demands that human beings integrate themselves into a specific social and political order as well as into a particular historical narrative through the study of a certain canon and its respective social and political modes of conduct. It is in this integrating sense that self-cultivation is understood as a unifying practice. In order to realize a peaceful world in the long term, Neo-Confucian ethics were constituted through humaneness ren (仁) and human interaction. Insights into the moral and metaphysical principle li through the study of the Four Books and the Five Classics were realized and became manifest in the social sphere only through human relations.34 Since it was not only the Neo-Confucian order and history, but also one’s own self that was constituted and ensured through self-cultivation, this social and moral practice had an existential function. According to the Neo-Confucian relational concept of the self, a person was constituted through specific hierarchical social relations, through the roles he/she had to fulfil, and through practices of self-cultivation. The self is defined in traditional Chinese culture, according to Confucianism, as the “center of relationships” in the family as well as in society; it is the basis of the cultivating process in which persons exist and cultivate themselves for the purpose of perfecting the self to better serve others.35

It is on the hierarchical structures of the family as the nucleus of society, that every other layer of the social order was organised and based.36 The social order was constituted and ensured through the principle of renlun (人伦) (i.e. the categorization of different social roles and their duties).37 The renlun-relationships, despite being hierarchical, were not constituted by domination but through reciprocal interactions, and in this regard they focused on the good of the other. Therefore, the self was not conceived as an individual but as a social role self and a strong emphasis was put on the value of community and collectivism. Oneself is the starting point, but to serve others is the ultimate aim of the process of cultivating one’s self as a social and cultural human being.38 “In this relationship persons were not completely individuals, for they had little individual identity or individuality, and existed above all to fulfil dutifully the various roles expected of them.”39 In other words, the social life of a human being was considered more important than one’s biological life.

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Total Art: An Art Concept of Critical “Comprehensive Understanding” (Guantong) and Interrelational Intervening (Self-Cultivation) Qiu Zhijie’s concept of Total Art appropriates the guantong-premises of interconnectedness and comprehensive understanding, but turns the traditional unifying and integrative function that is conventionally attributed to guantong (comprehensive understanding) into a critical function. The two artworks introduced above, Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project and Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, serve as significant examples of how Qiu Zhijie conceptualizes “comprehensive understanding” as a critical approach. By taking suicide rehabilitation as a starting point, all works of A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge seek to heighten the awareness of the existential function of critical interventions. It is not by ending one’s life––that is, by ceasing to intervene––but by becoming aware of and making use of the critical potential of intervening, or critically interrelating, that one gains insights into the interconnections of how reality and one’s self are constituted socially and historically. So doing regenerates oneself as an emancipated subject. Qiu Zhijie has expressed the impossibility of directly translating guantong into English40 and explains what he means by Guantong Yishu in the following: What we need is actually an art that is about free choice and opened possibilities. Total Art would then be art without bigotry, or, that is to say, open art. Its objective is to interconnect the individual practice with social responsibility; to interconnect unrestrained fantasy with reality, to interconnect craftsmanship with creation, and to break through the barrier between everyday life and art. Thus an even more accurate phrase would be: Guantong Yishu. 41

Qiu Zhijie, this article argues, adopts the concepts of “self-cultivation” and guantong in order to critique the unifying and existential function of these two traditional Chinese concepts on the one hand and the binary epistemological structure of Western modernity on the other. The artist explained that he rethought guantong as a practice that enables connection between aspects that, according to a binary epistemological structure, are conceived as contradictory. He particularly emphasises the importance of integrating individual freedom and social responsibility, rational research and affectual actions. He furthermore stresses, and thereby refers to his own interdisciplinary practice as artist, curator, writer, and teacher, that to be active in different work fields is not a contradiction. On the contrary, each role and field profits from the expertise gained in others. Qiu Zhijie seeks to connect innovative art experiences with daily life, since it is his persuasion that art is part of the solution for individual and social problems. Moreover, he adopts the term guantong to emphasize the importance of understanding the present as interconnected with the past and the future, since our present way of thinking is shaped by the past and will shape the thinking of the future.42 Similar to the traditional understanding of guantong, Qiu Zhijie does not produce knowledge or art for its own sake, but rather emphasises art’s obligation to act

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within social reality. However, in stark contrast to guantong, as it is conceptualized within the traditional Confucian and Neo-Confucian order of social reality, his understanding of guantong does not have a unifying perspective of an holistic social ideal according to the universal moral and metaphysical principle li, but rather serves the generation of critical art and the emancipation of one’s individual self. Instead of integrating oneself into a certain historical narrative and social order as it was expected in the Confucian and Neo-Confucian context, the educational ideal of “comprehensive knowledge” (guantong) in Qiu Zhijie’s understanding serves the critical function of enabling awareness of how specific structures and interconnections of knowledge, history, and society constitute specific subjects and vice versa. As Qiu Zhijie has repeatedly formulated in his writings and also visualized in the Map of Total Art (2012)43 (fig. 5, pl. XIV), freedom is the ultimate aim of Total Art. According to him, and illustrated through the examples mentioned in this article, freedom, which is assumed as innate and potentially present in every human being,44 is achieved through continuous reflection upon one’s social and historical interrelatedness––that is, by reflecting critically and intervening in the given structures of knowledge and regimes of truth.45 Like the traditional concept, Qiu Zhijie’s understanding of self-cultivation has an existential function. But while traditionally self-cultivation was an integrating and unifying practice that ensured the continuity of reality, history, and oneself according to the moral and metaphysical principle li and its respective order, Qiu Zhijie conceptualizes self-cultivation as a critical practice. Based on Total Art’s ultimate premise of freedom, it is by intervening critically into the structures that constitute reality, including oneself, that subjects are emancipated and “kept alive.” Total Art’s questioning of the unifying function of the traditional concept and practice of self-cultivation can be read as a critique of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism and of their assumed interrelational epistemological structure of art and life. In order to better understand the Nanjing Bridge Project’s claim that saving lives through art is a declaration of the emancipatory function of Total Art’s interventionism, a view through the lens of the Confucian cultural history of suicide is in order.

Suicide in China from a Cultural Historical Perspective From a cultural historical perspective, suicide in China was not categorically condemned.46 In the Confucian worldview suicide was sometimes even expected or encouraged in order to preserve moral integrity and to ensure social order.47 Based on the concept of a social-role self, discussed above, one was obliged to fulfil his/her duties and responsibilities according to the hierarchical order of the Confucian renlun.48 … rights and duties are the essential elements of human activities. Only when these two are kept in balance can society maintain stability and civilization progress. Only then can each member of society enjoy a stable, fulfilling life. In dealing with rights

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Fig. 5: Qiu Zhijie, Map of Total Art, 2012, c. 5 m length, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

and duties, traditional Chinese culture emphasized the importance of duties rather than rights. In China, in moral terms, rights were acquired through the fulfilment of duty. Rights were not regarded as innate or inborn; rather, they sprang from one’s position in society and the manner in which one fulfilled the duties, which the society required of this position.49

There are, for example, many biographical histories of scholar-officials who, during times of foreign rule, took their own lives out of loyalty to their former ruler, or stories of women who committed suicide after losing their social role-self as wife after being deserted by a husband.50 Paradoxically, suicide in these situations was seen as a relational act that, despite destroying one’s biological life, ensured that one’s social role-self and thus one’s social and cultural life remained intact. 51 It was believed that by leading a moral life one could even become immortal: As long as a deed is morally meaningful, a part of the doer remains alive. If one failed to perform one’s duties, even a high or powerful position would not secure one’s right. … Seen in this way, death is not something to be avoided as an end to existence, but instead is the greatest possible effort human conduct will allow.52

Against this historical background and taking into account the fact that contemporary Chinese society to this day considers social-role selves to be more important

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than the individual self,53 Qiu Zhijie’s interventions to save and rehabilitate people from committing suicide can be interpreted as a critique of the Confucian order of society and its related ethical premises. Thus, Qiu Zhijie’s life saving interventions can be read as acts of liberating and emancipating the individual self.54 In sync with this logic, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar? is not about condemning or morally judging suicide, but rather about critiquing a social structure in which people are taught that social integration and one’s social role-self outweighs one’s individual life.55

Conclusion Based on an assumed interrelational structure between art and life and a socially and historically constructed reality, Total Art interventions serve the critical function of not only increasing awareness of how specific structures of knowledge, history, and society constitute the self and vice versa, but also how one is able to change them. This critical practice assumes an existential function since, according to the Total Art premise of “freedom,” it is only through critically reflecting and intervening into reality and one’s own discursive and social interrelatedness/situatedness that one “keeps alive” as an emancipated subject. In order to uncover the questions that the project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge poses by adopting an interventionist perspective, and in order to develop criteria that enable a critical examination of the work, this article has analysed the Nanjing Bridge Project and its underlying concept of Total Art from a transcultural perspective. By extension, this has meant exploring how it critiques Euro-American as well as Chinese historical, socio-political, and epistemological frameworks. In accordance with Qiu Zhijie’s construction of Total Art, the work A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge can be situated within a larger history of critiquing Western modernity. Qiu Zhijie has emphasised how Total Art questions the conventional Western genealogy of socially engaged art, which is rooted in the binary structure of autonomous art versus socially engaged art,56 and instead seeks to contribute to an interrelated global discourse of Total Art: We knew quite clearly that we did not wish to and could not import the Euro-American concept of Total Art. Out of necessity, we stand on the foundations laid by Chinese and Western culture, looking to find our own way and to build our own methodology. Creating a framework to accompany the Mandarin-language notion of Total Art is not merely a way of stimulating art education in the domestic Chinese context, but a contribution to the entire global discourse of Total Art.57

The Map of Total Art visualizes this claim for a transcultural discourse of Total Art — that is, a discourse that takes into account multiple histories of Total Art and follows Total Art’s agenda of art’s critical intervention into reality. The interrelating of multiple concepts, practices, philosophies, cultures, and histories, such as,

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among others, “Fluxus Movement,” “Arts and Crafts Movement,” “Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk,” “Yanagi (Soetsu) Muneyoshi Handicraft Movement,” “Orchid Pavilion,” “Xiaozhuang School of Tao Xingzhi,” “Duchamp’s concept of the Readymade,” and “The Santiniketan University of Rabindranath Tagore,” whose common denominator is to conceptualize and practice art as life practice, is a clear articulation and statement against cultural essentialism.58 This paper argues that according to Total Art’s re-invention of “comprehensive understanding” (guantong) and self-cultivation as a critical emancipatory practice, recipients of Qiu Zhijie’s Total Art are asked to become aware of the multiplicity of histories and epistemologies for the socially engaged. Recipients are also required to study these multiple histories and epistemologies in order to critically reflect on their interrelatedness/situatedness within the specific social and historical structures of reality and related discursive frameworks and to take up the ethical responsibility of re-evaluating and transforming epistemological and social frameworks such as the still dominant binary epistemological structure rooted in Western modernity. In the long term, this might lead to a transcultural re-invention of institutions such as the discipline of art history or museums of art.

Notes 1 Maria Lind, “Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice” in Living as Form. Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, ed. Nato Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 50. 2 Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011), 19–66. 3 For example, Paul Gladston discusses the legacy and effects of Western modernity and its binary epistemological structure in relation to discourses on the relationship between art and life in China. See Gladston, “Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao, Part I: A Stratagem Towards a Post-Critical Art, Part I,” Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet 42/3 (2013), 174–179; Gladston, “Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao, Part II,” Contemporary Visual Art +Culture Broadsheet 42/4 (2013), 241–249. 4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). 5 Antonio S. Cua, Human Nature, Ritual, and History: Studies in Xunzi and Chinese Philosophy (Washington DC: The Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2005), 164. 6 Johnson Chang, “An Archaeological Position on the Future,” in Suicidology of the Nanjing Bridge, ed. Tyler Institute Singapore (Singapore: Tyler Institute Singapore, 2008), 23. 7 Zhu Zhu, Nanjing Changjiang daqiao: Qiu Zhijie de liang zi shu xie [朱朱：南京长江大桥：邱 志杰的两次书写] (The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge: Qiu Zhijie’s double Écriture), http:// www.douban.com/group/topic/18369378/ (last accessed June 2016). 8 Where Is the Capital of Madagascar? was on display in the first exhibition of the Nanjing Bridge Project entitled Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi––A Suicidology of The Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge (Nanjing changjiang daqiao zisha ganyu jihua — Zhuangzi de zhenjingji), which was organised at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai in the year 2008. 9 Qiu Zhijie, “Jieru shehui yishu shijian de zhuti [介入社会艺术实践的主体] (The Subject of the Socially Engaged Art Practices,” http://cul.sohu.com/20081128/n260913154.shtml (last accessed February 2016); Qiu Zhijie, “Ru he cheng wei wu zhi zhe [如何成為無知者] (How to Become an Empty Man),” presentation given by Qiu Zhijie, Humanities Building of the Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong (CUHK) on 15 March 2011, accessible at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, not available online. 10 Chang, “An Archaeological Position on the Future” (cf. note 6).

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11 I have written about this installation elsewhere. Please see Birgit Hopfener, “Tomorrow Will Be Different. Qiu Zhijie’s Concept of Keeping Alive Life through Art and Vice Versa” in Journal for Cultural Research, ed. Paul Gladston (forthcoming 2017). 12 Qiu Zhijie, “Yuan mu qiu yu. Cong xianshi yinsu chufa [缘木求鱼，从现实因素出发]” (To Climb a Tree to Catch a Fish. Departing from Reality), Qiu Zhijie’s blog, 26 July 2011, http:// www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/article.asp?id=495 (last accessed December 2015). 13 Qiu Zhijie, “On Total Art,” undated, no page numbers, trans. Jennifer Dorothy Lee with Rebecca E. Karl, http://www.qiuzhijie.com/e-critiquelunwen/016.htm (last accessed June 2015). 14 Qiu Zhijie, “Yuan mu qiu yu” (cf. note 12). 15 The Map of Total Art (2012) is a visualization of the concept of Total Art. The “Lake of Freedom” at the centre of the map is the declared aim of Total Art conceptualized as a contemporary mode of self-cultivation. Qiu Zhijie has also written about “freedom” as the aim of Total Art. See Qiu Zhijie, “Ren jing qi cai [人尽其才]” (Using Talent to the Utmost), Qiu Zhijie’s blog, 2006, http://www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/article.asp?id=91 (last accessed July 2015); Qiu Zhijie, “Xiushen yangxin, zou xiang tian zhen [修身养性，走向天真]” (Self-Cultivation: Advance Toward the True Human Nature), 2006, Qiu Zhijie’s blog, http://www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/article.asp?id=92 (last accessed December 2015). 16 Qiu Zhijie, “On Total Art” (cf. note 13). 17 Qiu Zhijie, “Jieru shehui yishu shijian de zhuti” (cf. note 9). 18 Elke Zobl and Rosa Reitsamer, “Intervene! Künstlerische Interventionen. Kollaborative und selbstorganisierte Praxen,” p/art/icipate—Kultur aktiv gestalten 4 (March 2014), http://www.p-articipate.net/cms/intervene-kunstlerische-interventionen/2/ (last accessed December 2015); Doreen Hartmann, Doreen Lemke, Inga Nitsche, eds., Interventionen. Grenzüberschreitungen in Ästhetik, Politik und Ökonomie (Munich: Fink Verlag), 201. 19 Qiu Zhijie, “On Total Art” (cf. note 13). 20 Cua, Human Nature, Ritual, and History (cf. note 5). 21 Antonio S. Cua, “Reason and Principle” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonio S. Cua (New York: Routledge, 2003), 632. 22 Cua, Human Nature, Ritual, and History (cf. note 5), 307. 23 Neo-Confucianism was first formulated in the Song dynasty (960–1279). It is based on, but also differs from, worldly Confucianism by adding metaphysical thoughts. According to Barry Keenan the three traits of Neo-Confucianism are: “Three traits that typified the origins of Neo-Confucianism: 1. Reshaping of what constituted the canon of Confucian Classics, 2. Philosophical doctrine that added metaphysical ideas to classical Confucian thought, 3. Elaborated program of self-cultivation.” Barry C. Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press), 7. 24 The concept of self-cultivation, though with differing concerns and agendas, plays a central role not only in Neo-Confucianism and Confucianism, but also in Daoism and Buddhism. On the topic of self-cultivation, see for example: Marcus Schmücker and Fabian Heubel, eds., Dimensionen der Selbstkultivierung. Beiträge des Forums für Asiatische Philosophie (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013). 25 Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 10−11. 26 “After 1313 Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian interpretation had biblical authority for all civil service examination and candidates aspiring to scholar-offical status.” Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 8, 13. 27 Vincent Shen and Kwong-loi Shun, eds., Confucian Ethics in Retrospect and Prospect (Washington D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008), 201. 28 Zhu Xi re-shaped the Confucian canon by adding the Four Books to the Confucian Five Classics. It was also Zhu Xi who determined that in the process of self-cultivation the Four Books were to be read sequentially in the following order: Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, Mean. Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 8. 29 The eight steps “make up the connection between individual self-cultivation and civil conduct in the social and political order.” See Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 37. “According to the Confucian text Daxue, the ideal Confucian needs to first cultivate his person, then to regulate his family, then to bring good order to the state, then to display enlightened virtue to

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the world. So here, cultivation of the person is the starting point and the foundation of the ideal Confucian life. How to cultivate one’s own person or self is explained in the Daxue as follows: Wishing to cultivate themselves, they first rectified their minds. Wishing to rectify their minds, they first made their intentions sincere, genuine and pure (cheng). Wishing to make their intentions sincere, genuine and pure, they first perfected their knowledge. Perfecting knowledge lies in investigation of things. Things being investigated, and subsequently knowledge is perfected. Make knowledge perfect, and subsequently one’s intentions are made sincere, genuine and pure. Make intentions sincere, genuine and pure, and subsequently the mind is rectified. Rectify the mind, and subsequently the self is cultivated.” (Daxue and Zhongyong, 46−47) See Guang Xing, “Buddhist and Confucian Attitudes toward Life: A Comparative Study,” International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Cultures 23 (2014), 7–48, particularly 14. Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 43. “It declared that after true ethical classics had been composed in ancient China, all literate people were provided with a means of tapping into the principles of moral knowledge that are part of human nature, and people of later eras could access those principles through the Four Books and the Five Classics. One consequence of this argument was that the culture that existed when the ancient classics were written did not itself have to be replicated, as long as the classics, as part of the process of self-cultivation, gave people access to the moral principles innate in each of us.” Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23). On calligraphy as a medium of self-cultivation, see Jean François Billeter, The Chinese Art of Writing (Geneva: Editions d’Art Albert Skira S.A,1990); and Yuehping Yen, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005). “Human nature in Neo-Confucianism was formulated as having two fundamental aspects: a pure and original mode of the mind that Chinese Buddhist called one’s Buddha nature, and an adulterated mode of mind that Neo-Confucians called one’s material nature as opposed to one’s original nature. (…) So the task of self-cultivation became to refine the material nature to recover the more pure underneath. Zhu Xi claimed our ‘original nature’ could release moral values (humaneness, rightness, ritual, and wisdom) or principles of the material force in which they were embedded could be refined in each of us. Self-cultivation through moral learning consistently clarifies the material force qi, in which are embedded all principles of our original nature. Principle then can start to shine through our material nature.” Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 11, 12. “These principles in one’s subjective experience become manifest through human relations.” Keenan, Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation (cf. note 23), 40. Kwok-kan Tam, Terry Siu-han Yip, “The Self in Transition: Moral Dilemma in Modern Chinese Drama” in Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Roger T. Ames, Thomas P. Kasulis, Wimal Dissanayake (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998), 200–216, here 200. Yüan-Huei Lin, The Weight of Mt. T’ai: Patterns of Suicide in Traditional Chinese History and Culture (PhD dissertation, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1990), 9. The so-called five lun, the most important social relations in Imperial China, encompassed the relationships between ruler and vassal, father and son, husband and wife, siblings, friends. Tam and Yip, “The Self in Transition” (cf. note 35), 200. Ibid. Qiu Zhijie in Bei Duola, Le Dadou, “Fu you gan shou li de huozhe, Qiu Zhijie fang tan lu [富有 感受力的活着, 邱志杰访谈录]” (Living full of sensibility, interview with Qiu Zhijie), Qiu Zhijie’s blog, 6 July 2013, http://www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/article.asp?id=568 (last accessed December 2015). Qiu Zhijie, “Tongguo yishu lun [贯通艺术论]” (On Guantong Yishu/Total Art), Qiu Zhijie’s blog, 13 July 2013, http://www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/article.asp?id=570 (last accessed February 2016). “Actually I am not satisfied with the word Total Art. It is a pity that the word guantong cannot be translated into English. What I mean is interconnection [guantong] in the following respects: first, to interconnect individual freedom and external social responsibility, second, to interconnect rational research and emotional actions in order to mutually enhance these aspects, third, the persuasion that different aspects and modes of work can interrelate without conflicting each other, finally that subversive art experience and daily life find a common ground to collude with each

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other. It is in this regard that to make/practice art means to solve problems of human life and society.” Ibid. I have written about the Map elsewhere. Please see Birgit Hopfener, “Qiu Zhijie’s Map of Total Art: Mapping as a Practice of Transcultural Intervention,” in Elegante Zusammenkunft im Gelehrtengarten: Studien zur Ostasiatischen Kunst zu Ehren von Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch (Elegant Gathering in a Scholar’s Garden: Studies in East Asian Art in Honor of Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch), ed. Annegret Bergmann et al., (Weimar: VDG Weimar, 2015), 300−304. Qiu, “Ren jing qi cai” (cf. note 15); id., “Xiushen yangxin, zou xiang tian zhen” (cf. note 15). Ibid. See Lin, who mainly refers to Confucian and Daoist worldviews. Lin, Weight of Mt. T’ai (cf. note 36). Ibid., 349. Ibid., 15. “The ideal of a society based on the principles of jen-lun [ren lun] is a society where all human beings prospered together. On the other hand, its basic requirement is that every individual lives up to his duties.” Ibid., 122. Ibid., 353, 354. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 346, 349, 352. Ibid., 122. See note 27 about the continuity of Confucian social order. Qiu Zhijie’s discourse of freedom and the emancipation of the individual can be traced back historically to the May Fourth Movement in 1918. See Tam and Yip, “The Self in Transition” (cf. note 35), here 200, 204. All types of suicides Lin mentions are understood in the logic of a social role self. Lin, Weight of Mt. T’ai (cf. note 36). Qiu Zhijie: “For a long time now the art world has vacillated between the left and the right. Every few years, people burst out of the woodwork saying that the contemporary art world is trapped in the ivory tower, that it is making mountains out of molehills, as a result of which, discussion turns towards intervention and interruption. And then the next generation will again join the fray: art, having been reduced to a tool, will now be defended as a bastion of independence equated to the defence of human dignity. Several years later, yet another generation will leap in to argue for intervention. This kind of pendulum-like movement has even become a feature of the curatorial discourse of international exhibitions.” See Qiu Zhijie, “On Total Art” (cf. note 13). Qiu Zhijie, “Total Art Based on Social Investigation,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 5/3 (2006), 78. I have written elsewhere how Qiu Zhijie positions himself against cultural essentialist discourses of Chineseness. See Birgit Hopfener, “Qiu Zhijie as Historian. Media Critique as a Mode of Critical Historical Research,” World Art 5/1 (2015), special issue, ed. Yuko Kikuchi, 41.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Qiu Zhijie, Map of Nanjing River Bridge Project, wall drawing with ink, ca. 7 m length, 2012, Rotterdam, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, on display in the exhibition Prompts & Triggers: Blueprints (2012) (photo: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam). Fig. 2: Qiu Zhijie, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, photography, 2008, Shanghai, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, on display in the exhibition Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi––A Suicidology of The Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge (Nanjing changjiang daqiao zisha ganyu jihua––Zhuangzi de zhenjingji), photo: courtesy of the artist. Fig. 3: Qiu Zhijie, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, photography, 2008, Shanghai, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, on display in the exhibition Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi––A Suicidology of The Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge (Nanjing changjiang daqiao zisha ganyu jihua––Zhuangzi de zhenjingji), photo: courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 4: Qiu Zhijie, Where Is the Capital of Madagascar?, wall inscriptions, 2008, Shanghai, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, on display in the exhibition Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi––A Suicidology of The Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge (Nanjing changjiang daqiao zisha ganyu jihua––Zhuangzi de zhenjingji), photo: courtesy of the artist. Fig. 5: Qiu Zhijie, Map of Total Art, wall drawing with ink, ca. 5 m length, 2012, Rotterdam, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, on display in the exhibition Prompts & Triggers: Blueprints (2012) (photo: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam).

TOMOKO MAMINE

Questioning Frames of Art History Murakami Saburō’s Breakthrough in 6 Holes1 On 18 October 1955, the day before the Gutai Art Association’s first exclusive group exhibition in Tokyo opened to the public, art was literally cracking up.2 In one of the rooms, Murakami Saburō 村上三郎 was breaking through three paper screens, causing an ear-splitting banging noise (fig. 1); and in the yard outside, Shiraga Kazuo 白髪一雄 was wallowing in a large pile of mud. Captured in photographs, scenes such as these from the First Gutai Art Exhibition have now gained iconic status (fig. 2). The Gutai Art Association 具体美術協会, or Gutai for short — founded in 1954 by a group of artists from the Hanshin region near Kobe and Osaka — considered texts and photography to be an important artistic means through which to promote their works not only to audiences in Japan, but also to “people all over the world.”3 Strategies such as the distribution of their bulletin Gutai, which were initiated by the group’s leader and senior member Yoshihara Jirō 吉原治良, an experienced painter and the managing director of a vegetable oil company, soon bore fruit. And exchange and cooperation with protagonists in the international art world were quickly established, for example with the French art critic and dealer Michel Tapié, his New York colleague Martha Jackson and the artists they promoted, as well as with artists and galleries in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, and with the groups ZERO and Nul.4 The images even reached the sphere of dance when pictures of early Gutai works, particularly those of Murakami, inspired the postmodern dancer and choreographer Simone Forti.5 In 1959, Gutai images were also included in Notizie, the journal of the Associazione Arti Figurative gallery in Turin, in Tapié’s 1961 book Continuité et avant-garde au Japon, in publications accompanying projects by ZERO and Nul from 1965 and 1966, in Allan Kaprow’s 1966 Assemblages, Environments and Happenings,6 and in the Paris-based critical magazine Robho in 1970.7 Thus, photos of early Gutai works have provided the grounds for divergent assessment by contemporaneous as well as later generations of artists, art critics, and historians, and they continue to do so to this day. In view of these transhistorical and transcultural entanglements of art and art history, Mieke Bal’s caveats about the “baggage” of the terms and methods applied in the description, analysis, and interpretation of artworks are still pertinent:8 If the entities, categories, models of classification, systematisation, and delineation of context, with their implicit premises, criteria, and values entrenched in Western narratives, are still taken as given, the objects of study are forced to merely illustrate and affirm these tools; and their potential to act upon their framings will be suppressed.

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Fig. 1: Murakami Saburō, Work (6 Holes), First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 18 October 1955

In an attempt to retrieve some of this potential, I shall take a closer look at Murakami’s Work (6 Holes) and approach the question of what it is through an examination of what it does.9 In order to do this, I shall examine its relation to the means and methods of its presentation and documentation as well as to Gutai as a group. I will show that Work (6 Holes), under the specific historical conditions of the 1950s, not only questioned conventionalised norms of artistic and cultural traditions, but was also — and continues to be — a bold proposition against inhibited thinking.

Within and Beyond Frames of (Re-)Presentation The black and white photographs from 1955 and 1956 showing Murakami at the moment when he broke through the screens (figs. 1, 3) have been discussed in relation to the question: What does the work and Gutai’s oeuvre in general actually consists of?10 Three components in Murakami’s Work (6 Holes) (1955) can be discerned as constitutive for its art historical classification: his material, his gesture, and what remained afterwards. The “object” consisted of three panels made from rectangular wooden frames that were covered with paper. The artist used a basic

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Fig. 2: Shiraga Kazuo, Challenging the Mud, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, October 1955, in Gutai 4 (1956)

wooden stretcher (widely available at art supply shops) in the standard 200P size (approx. 182 × 260 cm) that was made of four vertical and three horizontal planks; two further frames were built using the standard one as a model. Each of the three frames was covered on both sides with thick brown craft paper, but the outermost layer of paper on one side was backed with an additional layer. The screens were fixed parallel with the wood pieces and formed a body with a depth of approx. 70 cm (fig. 4). Murakami’s act of breaking through these objects linked contrasting moments: After standing still for a few moments,11 he hit the paper screens with his hands and feet in six quick strokes, and for the final stroke he jumped in using his whole body. In this final, physically extreme and exhausting strike he lost his glasses, and he then also lost consciousness.12 Although Murakami did not emerge from this clash unscathed, neither did the screens; the layers of torn paper foliating from the gaping holes, bore dramatic witness to the artist’s violent act. The tripartite object was afterwards displayed conventionally and hung on the wall between other exhibited works in the same room (fig. 5). Murakami, who planned to dispose of the object after the exhibition, was persuaded by Yoshihara to keep the broken screens a while longer.13 Photographs of the torn screens were used for postcards and were made available at the venue;14 they appeared in print media, and were reproduced in Gutai 4, which was published in July 1956.15 Considerations of Murakami’s work as a representative example of Gutai often rest upon clear dichotomies: performance art vs. paintings, process vs. product, ephemeral performance vs. lasting art object, concept vs. painting, immaterial vs. material, Western vs. Japanese, traditional vs. modern, original vs. imitation, documentation vs. original artwork, critical vs. affirmative, destructive vs. creative. The distinction between Japanese and Western, for instance, was linked to notions of tradition and modernity16 with regard to the materials used and to the gesture it-

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Fig. 3: Murakami Saburō, Passage, Second Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1956

Fig. 4: Murakami Saburō, Work (6 Holes), 1955, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 19 October 1955

self: As unmarked vertical surfaces stretched on wooden frames, Murakami’s screens clearly referred to the European tradition of oil-on-canvas painting, which was introduced and established as a genre of art practice in Japan during the country’s modernisation in the late nineteenth century. But the screens also, of course, alluded to Japanese folding screens or sliding room partitions such as byōbu (屏風) or fusuma (襖), since the paper was mounted in the same manner known as taikobari (太鼓張り) i.e. drum membranes, or fukurobari (袋張り). Murakami’s act was even seen as a reminder of the tradition of Japanese martial arts.17 By assigning the materials and gestures to either Japanese traditions or to modern Western art practice, Murakami’s act has been interpreted as an assault on Japanese craft tradi-

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Fig. 5: Postcard picturing Murakami Saburō, Work (6 Holes), 1955, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo

tions as well as on oil-painting practice, the latter revealing an “anti-Western impulse.”18 Yet if one understands the screens merely as the representatives of clearly defined traditions or cultures, the gesture can only be read as a physical rendition of the metaphor of attack — that is, as a symbolic act and representation of criticism — and disguises the fact that Gutai artists at that time rejected any literary narrative and figurative content in their work. Also, this reading tends to ignore the possibility that referring to traditions is not necessarily the main or single purpose of such artworks, but rather an indication of interest in questions and aspects raised by old and new objects that are considered actual and useful by artists. Another debate revolves around the question of whether Gutai works were paintings or performances. In order to counter the arbitrary reception and evaluation of Gutai through the narrative frameworks of “Western” art, which discriminated against the painting-like works created between 1957 and 1960 in favour of earlier experimental works, Osaki Shinichirō argued that the group’s actions were demonstrations of the production methods used for paintings and not performances in their own right, as they were defined by Western art history; that is, they took place without an audience, the screens were hung on the wall afterwards, and the postcards depicted the torn screens as exhibited work. Yet Murakami’s act was also an adaptable motif, for on the following day Yoshihara opened the exhibition by tearing a sheet of gold-painted paper stretched on a 500P size frame, which was mounted on the threshold of the exhibition room. The torn screen remained on

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display, and visitors had to enter through the hole. Murakami’s Work (6 Holes) caught the interest of the Japanese and international press. In the days that followed, reporters flocked to the venue,19 and Murakami twice set up paper screens in different formats in order to also break through them by punching and jumping.20 Shioya Jun 塩谷純 has suggested that Murakami offered these presentations rather as a courtesy to the press;21 however, photographs were included not only in newspapers but also in Gutai 4. How — or even if — they were displayed up to the end of the exhibition is not known. Murakami’s act was destructive and creative at the same time, using “fracture as facture,”22 and thus has been seen as a contradictory move through which painting and tradition were simultaneously attacked and affirmed. These contradictions, resulting from the presence of divergent references and meanings of material and gestures, were interpreted as an expression of the conflicts between wartime trauma and the future oriented ambitions of post-war Japanese society.23 While dichotomist framings, especially in conjunction with “artistic nationalism” and “cultural mercantilism,”24 were highly relevant in the post-war years, we must also keep in mind that the elements referred to in Murakami’s work were equally part of an everyday modern life experience and contained functions and meanings that shifted with actual use. Fusuma are not only a part of Japanese arts and crafts tradition, they are also a part of modern everyday life and are used in Japanese-style rooms in modern Japanese houses and apartments. Usually made to slide laterally along shallow rails, fusuma serve as walls or doors between living rooms and are used to separate storage spaces called oshiire (押入れ); they are also easily derailed and torn. As the newspaper reviews of the exhibition demonstrate, the everyday presence of fusuma was an association that was made by journalists immediately: Japanese children like to break shōji and this talented artist, Murakami Saburō, never grew out of the rich temptation. … Here he smashes through his canvas with a body blow and appears to be enjoying every second of the process of creating art. 25 Or: … holes torn in piece of paper as a child sticks his fingers through the Japanese paper covered doors. Only artist Saburo Murakami is not content with fingers, he leaps right through.26

The lightness with which Murakami’s act is described in the reviews differs from the scandalised public reaction to the scene in Ishihara Shintarō’s 石原慎太郎 novel Season of the Sun 太陽の季節, published in July 1955, which described shōji (障子) being torn with an erect penis.27 These comments on the playful aspect of Murakami’s work were very much on the mark, as Gutai artists often endeavoured to push painting to its limits by evoking children’s art.28 In fact, according to one anecdote Murakami was indeed inspired by his little son who, one day after the artist had shut himself away to work and declined to play, broke through the fusuma. The family also actually used craft paper for their fusuma without the supplementary covering layer of finer paper in order to avoid expensive maintenance; and

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they were covered with their son’s scrawls.29 This anecdote highlighting the everyday-ness of the material and the act of breaking it has often been used to explain the work as an adaption of his son’s act, which was driven by pure will and emotion. This also feeds into the stereotype of the pragmatic and down-to-earth attitude and sense of humour that is often attributed to people from the Kansai region, which is seen as contrasting with the more reserved Tokyoites. However, as has been suggested by Ming Tiampo, in Murakami’s case there seems to be more to the story: Literally piercing the picture plane with his body … Murakami pushed Gutai’s challenge to the flat Abstract Expressionist canvas further than any of his peers. … Murakami’s breach transformed the canvas as limit into the canvas as threshold, opening the realm of painting to include time and space.30

The anecdote, which is repeatedly evoked to explain the origins of Murakami’s idea, is often taken as sufficient explanation of the work; however, it pulls the rug out from under the unambiguous identification and symbolical interpretation of his work and tends to distract from further exploration of how Murakami’s Work (6 Holes) actually used the above-mentioned references to address questions of time and space.

Questioning Frames of Painting Leaving aside questions of necessity, using thick, plain brown craft paper also gives the screens a rough allure, as it is nowhere near as precious as the finer papers that are typically used for the outer layers of fusuma. The object thus looks self-crafted, affordable, and familiar, which makes the work all the more approachable and appealing to viewers. But Murakami was not the only Gutai member who mounted paper on stretchers. In the 1950s, Shimamoto Shōzō 嶋本昭三 began to mount newspaper on wooden stretchers as a substitute for canvases. He drew and painted on these newspapers but ended up breaking holes and slits into the surface. These approaches were encouraged by Yoshihara, around whom the young artists gathered in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who saw these experiments as a means of learning more about abstract art. The artists had backgrounds in yōga oil painting, nihonga (traditional Japanese painting style), architecture, graphic design, manga, and cartoon drawing, but they felt restricted by figurative drawing and painting, which was still the basis of formal art education in Japan. Inspired by the work of abstract artists in Europe and the United States, and through interdisciplinary exchange with artists in other fields of practice (e.g. calligraphy and children’s art), they sought a “new kind of painting” that could transcend “painting” as “images” (絵)31 and generate immediate connections between artists, works, and viewers. Encouraged by Yoshihara’s edict to “[c]reate what has never been done before,”32 they both competed with past and contemporaneous artists — including, of course, fellow members — and reflected on artists such as Piet Mondrian33 as well as on older positions of art history. As articulated by Murakami in 1957:

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Painting had never incorporated time as a concrete factor. The Cubists expressed different factors of time on the same plane and the Futurists tried to express the movement of time itself. … There, time was simply presented as the ideological content or an image of time. … By abandoning the frame or jumping off the wall, we are trying to experiment with a new painting that shifts from immobile time to live time. … The change that is about to take place in here possesses a lasting time, which rouses emotion in itself. A space for such time and time for such a space — this is a painting with a new meaning.34

These art historical considerations contradict the criticism that Gutai lacked an art theoretical backbone. However, the daily press in 1955 and 1956 highlighted the spectacular and playful side of the works, describing Murakami’s act within Gutai as taiatari (体当たり), a word meaning “ramming with the whole body” that is used in martial arts and sports and is also used as a metaphor for energetically tackling things without much thought or consideration. The general amusement shared by visitors, the press, and the artists themselves, is also expressed in the use of the term Dada to describe the effects of humour, nonsense, and surprise. However, Work (6 Holes) resists being hastily categorised as a conventional painting. One of the works that Murakami presented at the First Gutai Art Exhibition in the same room consisted of paper mounted on a 100P size stretcher and covered with black enamel. The paper, once torn, revealed an unpainted backside as well as the bare wall behind.35 The second work by Murakami consisted of a 20P canvas which he smeared with leftover oil paint.36 This work also seemed to be a tongue-in-cheek salute or riposte to his friend Shiraga, who used his feet to smear oil paint onto large canvasses and papers spread on the floor. Distinguishing himself from Shimamoto’s experiments with newspaper on stretchers, Murakami created three “double-sided canvasses” for Work (6 Holes). This contradicted the very idea of canvas painting in which all elements are subordinated to the effects on the front that are presented to the viewer. In Murakami’s screens there is no distinction between front and back, the distinction was only produced through his movement and was suggested in the photographs, which were taken from the side of the screens out of which Murakami emerged. However, when the screens were hung on the wall afterwards, they were turned around so that visitors were offered a view through the layers of torn paper, which resembled a tunnel with tapering holes. Also in the postcards the screens are neither pictured as hanging on the wall, nor as plain photographic reproductions of the painting’s surface. Instead the work is shown as a freestanding three-dimensional object from a three-quarter view. In addition, a photo published in the US-army’s journal Pacific Stars & Stripes (fig. 6) reveals the architectural, space-demanding presence of the screens, which appear strange beside the paintings on the wall. By applying paper on stretchers for canvasses in 200P size,37 Murakami built an outsized object in the dimensions that were conventionally recommended for landscapes, but the screens were created using the scale of a human body. By using his own body to jump into and tear up the canvas-fusuma-screen, one might say that Murakami literally opened up the conventional format to encompass an immediate visualisation of “real” vitality,

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Fig. 6: Photograph from I.G. Edmonds, “Art is a Hole in the Ground,” Pacific Stars & Stripes, 9 November 1955

outperforming conventional genres of painting such as still-life, portrait, history, or landscape; his actions managed to convert the immediacy of movement, speed, and energy into art. What canvas, fusuma, and film screens have in common is that they provide a barrier between spaces and spheres, distracting the viewer from the perception of the real space. Indeed, in his two-room apartment, one of Murakami’s large-size paintings actually served as a wall.38 Furthermore, the taikobari method also serves to encase and hide the space within the two layers. By breaking through the paper layers of the three screens that were placed together to create a depth of his own arm length (approx. 70 cm),39 Murakami was literally breaking through to an undisguised and unhindered perspective onto “real” space and into daily life, breaching the distinction between the spheres of art and the everyday. It was also an experiment in the relationship between a body’s movement through different planes of time and space and its “image”; thus, the two-dimensional planes were opened up to include further dimensions.

Frame by Frame Inaga Shigemi 稲賀繁美 has pointed out that at the end of René Clair’s 1929 film Entr’acte, starring Marcel Duchamp, one of the actors falls through the screen — another stretched and unmarked plane surface — tearing a hole.40 Although it is not known if the film was screened in Japan in the period, Entr’acte was mentioned in Japanese film magazines and in reviews on Clair, who had been very popular in Japan since the 1930s. We do not know whether or not Murakami was aware of Clair’s Entr’acte; however, Work (6 Holes) clearly resonates with the questions of immediacy and time seen in the film. Both works address artistic and philosophical questions about the structure of images of movement and of moving images,

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Fig. 7: Murakami Saburō, Passage, Second Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1956

though they differ in that while the sequence in Entr’acte is reversed so that the actor flies back through the hole and the screen is restored as a neat, intact surface, Murakami’s break was, obviously, irreversible. By using photography for the documentation and promotion of their activities and to “appeal to people” near and far, Gutai artistic strategies clearly took temporal lag into account when considering the impact and reception of their work.41 To that end, evocative documentary photographs taken by Gutai artists, their families, and friends were included in Gutai, particularly after its third issue. These pictures have been treated mainly as documentary sources; a perspective which overlooks the fact that that they were carefully selected, trimmed, and arranged. As previously mentioned, pictures showing Murakami tearing 6 Holes almost always put the emphasis on Murakami jumping out of the screen instead of leaping into it. However, it is interesting to note that because Murakami’s movements were actually too quick to be captured by photography,42 the famous photo (fig. 1) had to be restaged. A photoshoot with LIFE magazine in April 1956, at which Murakami presented Work (6 Holes) anew, probably further heightened Gutai’s awareness of the effectiveness of photography. The two double-page spread in Gutai 4, published in July 1956, which mainly pictured the torn screens, can be understood as a correction of the spectacular “image” of Gutai and Murakami “in action” that was circu-

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Fig. 8: Page from Michel Tapié, “Mathieu Paints a Picture,” Art News 53/10 (1955)

lated in the newspapers.43 For the Second Gutai Art Exhibition at the Ohara Hall in October 1956, a photoshoot was organised and attended by photographers such as Ōtsuji Kiyoji 大辻清司 for the art magazine Geijutsu shinchō (芸術新潮).44 For this occasion Murakami set up twenty-one square format wooden frames covered with craft paper on both sides and put one behind the other to reach a length of about 8 metres. Pictures were taken from the side and the “front” as he punched and stumbled through the screens using his whole body. In fact, Ōtsuji’s “striking” image of Murakami breaking through the screens (fig. 7) was one of the images that would frame Yoshihara’s “Gutai Art Manifesto 具体美術宣言,” published in Geijutsu shinchō’s December issue in 1956. The photo showing Murakami jumping through the last screen that became an icon (fig. 3) was also taken at this occasion, yet it actually had to be retaken because the last screen came detached.45 Yoshihara was actually interested in photography earlier in his life,46 and was particularly intrigued by Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of the US-American artist Jackson Pollock painting, which were published in Art News.47 The article was part of the segment called “… paints a picture,” which was set up by the magazine’s editor Thomas B. Hess in the early 1950s and featured painters such as Willem de Kooning or George Mathieu, as well as sculptors in Europe and the United States, in their studios and presented their methods and environments of production (fig. 8). This attention to production processes was also reflected in films, including Gjon Mili’s photos of Pablo Picasso drawing with light (1949) or the documentary film on Henri Matisse by François Campaux (1946). Japanese art magazines at that

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time also comprised instructions on how and with which material to paint or to sculpt. Although these tended to prescribe rules of art practice, they were part of the art educational discourses of the time, which considered process more important than the end product and may have fueled Gutai’s continued emphasis on processuality. At a time when mass media was beginning to pick up speed and momentum, it was not just these kinds of art-related sources that were becoming available, but also more popular images. In Japanese newspapers, for instance, photographs analysing movements were included on the sports pages (when Gutai’s exhibition took place in Tokyo, the newspapers were full of coverage about the New York Yankees’ tour to Japan and also included analysis of Mickey Mantle’s or Yogi Berra’s techniques in a series of chronophotographs). This was all part of a major trend towards rationalising and optimising society in countries such as Japan, which were striving for economic recovery and also relying upon automation. However, in a move that recalls Marcel Duchamp’s twist on Cubist and Futurist concepts of time and space in his controversial painting Nu descendant un escalier no 2 (1912), baseball — a sport described as “drama without plot” as you cannot foresee its final outcome48 — seems to have fueled Murakami’s recurrent reflections on the same issues: before he discovered his method of paper-tearing, Murakami experimented with throwing a ball covered with colour against paper, leaving a warped imprint behind as an inscription of speed, vitality, and energy. Likewise, in Work (6 Holes) the traces of bodily contact and of energy and power were left behind on the paper. As previously mentioned, the movements were actually too fast to be captured in photographs — blindsiding the notion of photography’s accuracy and echoing Kinoshita Toshiko’s 木下淑子 comments about colour photography’s incapability to capture lively colours caused by the reaction of chemicals on the paper.49 These quick movements stood in sharp contrast to the overlooked laborious process of production, namely the fact that building the frames for the pre-opening and opening day took Murakami two nights. By breaking through the screens and — to use the mathematician Tōyama Hiraku’s 遠山啓 metaphor — digging a tunnel through three dimensions in order to arrive at the fourth,50 the relation between production, presentation, reception, and documentation collapsed. Moreover, by passing from frame to frame Murakami ruptured the separations between different spaces and spheres and collapsed the distinctions between temporalities. Adding to the philosophically charged notion, it is worth noting that this type of paper breaking was called passage (tsūka 通過); which is a reminder of the strange co-existence of different temporalities in the short moment when express trains pass stations and slower trains with a bang. In this way Murakami brought entities of thought that were usually seen as contradictory or distinct into a state of inbetweenness and relationality. This was embodied in the Japanese concept of ma (間), which has been revaluated by Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 and Matsuoka Seigō 松岡正剛.51 Having studied philosophy at university, Murakami was often called the philosopher among Gutai members: he was known for casually quoting Jean-Paul Sartre or Friedrich Nietzsche, and, as Reiko

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Tomii has pointed out, for his interest in Henri Bergson. Furthermore, the conjunction of creation and destruction in Murakami’s act (as well as in Yoshihara’s “Gutai Manifesto”) not only echoes Sartre’s description of the interdependency of both activities for human existence in his 1943 L’être et le néant, but also Sartre’s thoughts on the relation of the three temporal dimensions of past, present, and future to a “structure totalitaire.”52 At the same time, ideas on the infinity of presence between birth and death, such as those articulated in the eighth-century Buddhist monk Kūkai’s 空海 Hizō hōyaku 秘蔵宝鑰 or the thirteenth-century Buddhist priest Dōgen’s 道元 notion of uji (有事), which understands time and existence/space as inseparable in Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵, also resonate.53 From this point of view, we can see that Murakami’s work both escapes and questions all the unambiguous demands that are placed upon it. Although the motif of breaking paper became a trademark for Murakami — one which was he was continually called upon to repeat and is now treated as its own category of works under the term paper breaking (kamiyaburi 紙破り)54 — it is cut off once it is seen within the limiting terms of original and re-enactment or as second-rate copies. However, notions of ephemerality and the endless variability in the stream of time continually surface in the work, which is an unidentifiable, concretised form of time — collapsing production, presentation, documentation, and reception into one situation — that may be physically experienced in one moment. Because thoughts on movement, infinity, seriality, and variation in time and space were built into Work (6 Holes), its re-enactment in celebratory versions for exhibition openings where the paper was painted gold (in these versions, which were created for exhibition openings, Murakami suggested that he liked the idea of breaking something that reminded him of valuable gold-leafed byōbu) was not considered a contradiction. Indeed, in the 1990s the reconsideration of the dimension of sound, which had not been intended initially, became an important feature. Like any encounter and any moment in time, each presentation of paper breaking is different, and the idea of breaking through paper can or even has to be developed, adapted, and varied constantly. Thus, Murakami’s work claims the unique freedom to transform with the circumstances and without any categorical valorisation. Furthermore, the fact that Murakami resumed painting-style works around 1956 with his paintings that peel off (剥落する絵画) is not a contradiction when we look at the works themselves instead of being distracted by notions of style and genre. According to Shioya, the need to cling to material remains and to distinguish between artwork and documentation had become an obsession in the art world,55 but Murakami’s Work (6 Holes) makes us rethink this question.

Conclusion As simple, spontaneous, and haphazard as Murakami’s Work (6 Holes) may appear, it challenges our thinking in many different ways and on many different levels. Not only did it challenge conventions and definitions of art in the 1950s (those of gen-

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Fig. 9: Murakami Saburō, All Landscapes, 1956, Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition, Ashiya Park, Ashiya, 1956

res and the distinction of art from everyday life and culture, for instance), it embraced dichotomies to become simultaneously creative and destructive, violent and playful, ephemeral and infinite, literal and metaphorical, abstract and concrete, thereby thematising and embodying polysemy and dismantling all attempts at unambiguous interpretation and explanation. By going beyond the literal critique of artistic traditions, Work (6 Holes) questioned and rendered visible the limits of human perception and interpretation, and still does today. By jumping through the frames, Murakami literally tackled the problem of the choice of frame, turning the theoretical and virtual question into an artistically created situation of co-presence that occurred in real space and cannot be grasped today. Instead of a work that can be or has to be verbally explained in analytical terms, Murakami created a situation that could be experienced immediately and could transcend and dismantle the application of pre-set categories. Resonating with the Buddhist Heart Sutra 般若波羅蜜多心経, which teaches that everything in the world is void and thus free from any inherent and essential identity except in relation to anything else, Murakami wrote in 1955: A human being is capable of looking at all kinds of things and thinking about them in connection with reality of his or her own life. However, I feel that that is no more than regarding things selfishly at one’s own convenience. Our concrete sensation of the universe should be something more infinite and free.56

As if symbolising this idea, at the Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition in the summer of 1956, Murakami presented a wooden frame hanging from a tree (fig. 9). The framing, scale, trimming etc. depended on and changed with the wind and weather and, of course, with the position of the viewer, reminding us that any volatile and unstable segment that can be caught within the frame is only one small segment of the world. Murakami invites us to think about his works as functioning simultaneously

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on metaphorical and abstract, literal and concrete levels, and likewise to examine them concurrently through the frames of photography, from our own point of view, and through our own questions.

Notes 1 An earlier short version of this article was published as “Übersetzte Verkörperungen, verkörperte Übersetzungen. Saburō Murakamis 6 Löcher (1955),” IFKnow 1 (2015), 4–7. I would like to thank the Murakami family, ARTCOURT Gallery, the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Yamamoto Atsuo, and Sakaide Noriaki for their kind and generous support and for their precious input. 2 Gutai members were involved in other exhibitions earlier that year. 3 Yoshihara Jirō 吉原治良, “発刊に際して (On the Occasion of the Publication of the Bulletin),” Gutai 1 (1955), transl. by Kikuko Ogawa, Gutai, Facsimile Edition 具体  復刻版, ed. Ashiya City Museum of Art & History (Tokyo: Geikashoin, 2010), Supplement, 9. See also “美術雑誌 を作成：阪神若手画家グループ [Producing an Art Magazine: Group of Young Kansai Artists],” Shinkō shimbun 神港新聞, 21 January 1955 (Ashiya City Museum of Art & History archives). 4 In the United States they reached artists such as Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson, art critic B.H. Friedman, and the publisher and bookstore owner George Wittenborn. See Katō Mizuho 加藤 瑞穂, “世界への掛橋 — 1967–59年の具体 (A Bridge to the World: Gutai, 1956–1959),” in Gutai, Facsimile Edition (cf. note 3), Supplement, 100–108, 130–136. 5 Simone Forti, interviewed by Jenny Schlenzka, “Drunk with Movement,” Flash Art 269, November–December 2009, 44. 6 Notizie 2/8 (1958); NUL 1965 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1965); Michel Tapié, Continuité et avant-garde au Japon (Turin: Edizioni d’arte Fratelli Pozzo, 1961); English edition: Avant-Garde Art in Japan (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962); Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966); Robho 5/6 (1971). 7 Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011), 94–96. On Robho, see also Isabel Plante, “Les Sud-Américains de Paris: Latin American Artists and Cultural Resistance in Robho Magazine,” Third Text 24/4 (2010), 445–455. 8 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73/2 (1991), 174– 208; Mieke Bal, “Grounds of Comparison” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 129–167. 9 Works by Gutai artists were usually not given titles but only called “works,” though they were sometimes supplemented with a keyword in order to distinguish them from others. Thus, 6ツの 穴 [6 Holes] has been also called 作品(6ツの穴) Work (6 Holes), or earlier as 一気に６ツの穴 を開ける [At One Moment Opening 6 Holes]. 10 Over seventy artists were involved in Gutai until its dissolution in 1972. 11 See Yamamoto Atsuo 山本淳夫, “村上三郎: 時空に遊ぶ即興演奏家 (Saburo Murakami: An Improviser who Plays with Space and Time)” in Saburo Murakami 1996 村上三郎, exhibition catalogue Ashiya City Museum of Art & History (Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, 1996), 9–14, 17–22; Murakami Saburō in interview with Osaki Shinichirō, 28 June 1985, Document Gutai 1954–1972 具体資料集 (Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, 1994), 372–379, 374. 12 Yoshihara Jirō 吉原治良, “On the First ‘GUTAI-TEN’ 具体第一回展の記録,” Gutai 4 (1956), 2, 3; Yamazaki Tsuruko 山崎つる子, “東京の具体人 [Gutaians in Tokyo],” Gutai 4 (1956), 32. 13 See interview in Document Gutai 具体資料集 (cf. note 11). The only extant object resulting from Murakami’s paper breaking is the one he made for the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1994. 14 The artist collectives of Nikakai 二科会 and Kyūshitsukai 九室会, both of which counted Yoshihara as a member, also distributed postcards of works. See, for example, Reiko Tomii, “An Experiment in Collectivism: Gutai’s Prewar Origin and Postwar Evolution” in Gutai: Splendid Play-

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ground, exhibition catalogue Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), 248–253. Gutai 4 appeared on 1 July 1956. Identical images were used in different newspapers, which were possibly forwarded to the press by the artists themselves. See, for example, Helen Westgeest, “No Meaning, No Composition, No Colour: From Zero to Gutai” in Gutai: Painting in Time and Space, exhibition catalogue Museo Cantonale d’Arte Lugano (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 120–161. Friedrich Weltzien, “Von der Fraktur zur Faktur: Gutai und die Gewalt des Schaffens im Kontext europäischer Nachkriegsavantgarden” in F(r)aktur. Gestörte ästhetische Präsenz in Avantgarde und Spätavantgarde, ed. Anke Hennig, Brigitte Obermayr, Georg Witte (Vienna: Kubon & Sagner, 2006), 183–209. Murakami’s movements were not controlled, but what can be considered athletic is the addition of a paper layer to increase the resistance, and the use of three screens instead of one. Ibid., 199. “具体紙上展1:「偶然は新しい経験」それたボールからヒント [Gutai Exhibition on Paper 1: ‘Accident as New Experience:’ Hints from Swerved Balls],” Mainichi shimbun 毎日新聞, Hanshin edition, 20 November 1955, 8. On 22 October he jumped through a set of five upright oblong screens, and on 25 October he jumped out of a cube made of paper screens. See overview in 村上三郎 スルー  ザ  セヴン ティーズ Murakami Saburō: Through the ’70s, ed. ARTCOURT Gallery (Osaka: ARTCOURT Gallery, 2013), 108–117. Shioya Jun 塩谷純, “モノより思い出  思い出よりモノ(Memory over Object OR Object over Memory),” in 「オリジナル」の行方:  文化財アーカイヴ構築のために (Capturing the “Original:” Archives for Cultural Properties) (Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 2013), 17–35, here 35; Atsuo Yamamoto, “Space, Time, Stage, Painting” in Gutai: Moments de destruction, moments de beauté, ed. Atsuo Yamamoto, Ming Tiampo, Florence de Mèredieu (Paris: Blusson, 2002), 7–35. Weltzien, “Von der Fraktur” (cf. note 17). Weltzien, “Von der Fraktur” (cf. note 17), 202–207; Tiampo, Decentering Modernism (cf. note 7), 24–25. Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 5–18; Tiampo, Decentering Modernism (cf. note 7), 3–5. “Conventionalism Scorned by Art Group,” The Mainichi, 22 October 1955, 7 (Ashiya City Museum of Art & History archives). I.G. Edmonds, “Art is a Hole in the Ground,” Pacific Stars & Stripes, 11 November 1955, 16 (Ashiya City Museum of Art & History archives). Ishihara won the Akutagawa Prize in 1956 for this novel, which was adapted for film immediately. Takeda Taijun 武田泰淳 claimed that he had used this imagery already in his novel Igyō no mono 異形のもの [The Misshapen Ones] in 1950. Yamamoto, “Space, Time, Stage, Painting” (cf. note 21), 32–35. See interview in Document Gutai (cf. note 11). Murakami Makiko in interview with Murakami Saburō and Tsukamura Mami, in Murakami Saburo: Entrance — Passage — Exit 入口 — 通 過 — 出口 (Osaka: Flip books, 1996), CD-ROM. Tiampo, Decentering Modernism (cf. note 7), 25. Yamamoto, “Space, Time, Stage, Painting” (cf. note 21), here 32–35. Reiko Tomii, “Murakami Saburō’s ‘Picture Mind’” in Murakami Saburō: Through the ’70s, ed. ARTCOURT Gallery (Osaka: ARTCOURT Gallery, 2013), 100–106. Ming Tiampo, “‘Create what has never been done before!’ Historicising Gutai Discourses of Originality,” Third Text 21/6 (2007), 689–706. Natsu Oyobe, Human Subjectivity and Confrontation with Materials in Japanese Art: Yoshihara Jirō and Early Years of the Gutai Art Association, 1947–1958 (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2005), 137. Murakami Saburō 村上三郎, “具体美術について (On Gutai Art),” Gutai 7 (15 July 1957), unpaginated, transl. by Kikuko Ogawa, Gutai, Facsimile Edition (cf. note 3), Supplement, 61.

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35 “Gutai Exhibition on Paper 1” (cf. note 19), 8. The article describes the form of the tear in allusion to Mount Fuji. 36 ARTCOURT Gallery, ed., Murakami Saburō: Through the ‘70s (cf. note 20), 69. 37 Art supplies in Japan offer standard sizes according the conversion of French sizes to Japanese measures in the Meiji era. Each size is offered in slightly differing variants for “figure” (F), “paysage” (P), and “marine” (M). 38 Murakami Tomohiko 村上知彦, 1976–1993日々の本 (Books and the Days. 1976–1993) (Tokyo: Futabasha, 1993), 198. 39 Murakami Saburō in interview with Tsukamura Mami in Murakami Saburo: Entrance — Passage — Exit (cf. note 29). 40 Inaga Shigemi 稲賀繁美, “記憶収蔵庫はどこにあるのか?  第32回文化財の保存及び修 復に関する国際研究集会I:「オリジナル」の行方:文化財アーカイヴ構築のために 雑感 (Where is the Storage of Memory? Miscellaneous Thoughts on the 32rd International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: Capturing the “Original” — Archives for Cultural Properties),” Aida 間 155 (2008), 21–29. 41 While Gutai 1 presented photographic reproductions of paintings almost exclusively, after Gutai 2 more consideration was given to layout: The format changed, and texts by members and photographs other than work reproductions were included. 42 Yoshihara, “On the First ‘GUTAI-TEN’” (cf. note 12). 43 In contrast, Shiraga, the only other member given a two double-page spread in the same issue, was pictured crawling in the mud (fig. 2). There was one photo showing Murakami jumping (through the box), but it was a small photo. 44 Obinata Kin’ichi 大日方欣一, “具体と大辻 1956–7年の遭遇をめぐって (Encounters between Gutai and Otsuji Kiyoji (1956 and 1957)),” in 大辻清司「具体1956-57」をめぐって (On Otsuji Kiyoji’s Gutai 1956–57) (Tokyo: Tokyo Publishing House, 2012), 25–35. 45 See also Shioya, “Memory over Object” (cf. note 21), 23. The photo taken from the front side was occasionally mistaken for an image from the 1955 exhibition (for instance in Kaprow’s book). Also, the Flash Art interview with Simone Forti, confuses Murakami’s works of 1955 and 1956. Forti had apparently seen the photos in the late 1950s at Anna Halprin’s place while she and her partner, the artist Robert Morris, lived and worked with Halprin in San Francisco. 46 For Yoshihara’s interest in photography and film see: Osaki Shinichirō 尾崎信一郎, “吉原治良 と写真の視覚 [Yoshihara Jirō and the Vision of Photography],” in 吉原治良研究論集 [Collected Studies on Yoshihara Jirō], ed. Society for the Study of Jirō Yoshihara 吉原治良研究会 (Ashiya: Yoshihara Jirō kenkyūkai, 2002), 41–54; Katō Mizuho 加藤瑞穂, “16ミリフィルム 「cine-memo」に見られる吉原治良の造形的関心 [Yoshihara Jirō’s Artistic Interest Shown in the 16mm film ‘cine-memo’],” Kajima bijutsu zaidan nenpō 鹿島美術財団年報 28 (2010), 189–200. 47 On Yoshihara’s reception of Robert Goodnough’s article “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Art News 50/4 (1951), 38–41, 60–61, including Namuth’s pictures, see, for example, Tiampo, Decentering Modernism (cf. note 7), 47–50. 48 This was attributed to the baseball player and coach Mihara Osamu 三原脩. 49 Kinoshita Toshiko 木下淑子, untitled text, Gutai 2 (1955), 18–19. 50 Tōyama Hiraku 遠山啓, 無限と連続：現代数学の展望 [Infinity and Series: Outlook of Modern Mathematics] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1952), 107–108. 51 MA Espace-Temps du Japon, exhibition catalogue Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris: Festival d’automne de Paris, 1978); Matsuoka Seigō, 花鳥風月の科学 [The Science of Kachōfūgetsu (Beauties of Nature)] (Kyoto: Tankōsha, 1994), 262–288; Augustin Berque, Le sens de l’espace au Japon. Vivre, penser, bâtir (Paris: Editions Arguments, 1999). 52 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1943), 42–46, 142–165. 53 Kūkai 空海, 秘蔵宝鑰 [The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury]; Dōgen 道元, “有事 [The Time-Being]” in 正法眼蔵 [Treasury of the True Dharma Eye]. 54 There is a random closeness to the adjective katayaburi (型破り), meaning breaking the form or pattern, or offbeat and unconventional.

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55 Shioya, “Memory over Object” (cf. note 21), 28. 56 Murakami Saburō, untitled text, Gutai 2 (1955), 15, transl. by Kikuko Ogawa, Gutai, Facsimile Edition (cf. note 3), Supplement, 10; 般若波羅蜜多心経 [Heart Sūtra].

Illustrations Fig. 1: Murakami Saburō, Work (6 Holes), 1955, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1955. © Makiko Murakami. Courtesy of Tomohiko Murakami, the Estate of Saburo Murakami, ARTCOURT Gallery. Fig. 2: Pages showing Shiraga Kazuo, Challenging the Mud, 1955, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, reproduced in: Gutai 4 (1956), 6–7. Fig. 3: Murakami Saburō, Passage, 1956, Second Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo. © Makiko Murakami. Courtesy of the Estate of Saburo Murakami, ARTCOURT Gallery. Photo courtesy: Osaka City Museum of Modern Art GA07. Fig. 4: Murakami Saburō, Work (6 Holes), 1955, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo. © Makiko Murakami. Courtesy of the Estate of Saburo Murakami, ARTCOURT Gallery. Photo courtesy: Osaka City Museum of Modern Art GA07. Fig. 5: Postcard picturing Murakami Saburō, Work (6 Holes), 1955, First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo. © Makiko Murakami. Courtesy of the Estate of Saburo Murakami, ARTCOURT Gallery. Photo courtesy: Osaka City Museum of Modern Art GA07. Fig. 6: Photograph from I.G. Edmonds, “Art is a Hole in the Ground,” Pacific Stars & Stripes, 9 November 1955, 16. ©1955, 2016 Stars and Stripes, All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the Estate of Saburo Murakami, ARTCOURT Gallery. Fig. 7: Murakami Saburō, Passage, 1956, Second Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo. © Seiko Otsuji, Makiko Murakami. Courtesy of the Estate of Saburo Murakami, ARTCOURT Gallery. Fig. 8: Page from Michel Tapié, “Mathieu Paints a Picture,” Art News 53/10 (1955), 50–53 and 74, here 50. Fig. 9: Murakami Saburō, All Landscapes, 1956, Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition, Ashiya Park, Ashiya. © Makiko Murakami. Photo courtesy: Osaka City Museum of Modern Art GA07.

JULIANE NOTH

Comparing the Histories of Chinese and Western Landscape Painting in 1935 Historiography, Artistic Practice, and a Special Issue of Guohua Yuekan Several prominent artists working in the medium of traditionalist Chinese ink painting (guohua 國畫) in Shanghai joined together to establish the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo huahui 中國畫會) in 1932.1 As has been described in previous studies, the politician, calligrapher, and collector Ye Gongchuo (葉恭綽, 1881–1968) initiated the establishment of a national art society in 1930 and enlisted the art critic Lu Danlin (陸丹林, 1896–1972) to draft a mission statement for the new association.2 According to this text, titled “Guohua Artists Must Unite,” the association had three main goals: “(1) to develop the age-old art of our nation; (2) to publicise it abroad and raise our international artistic stature; (3) with a spirit of mutual assistance on the part of the artists, to plan for a [financially] secure system.”3 One of the activities undertaken4 to serve the first two aims was the publication of the journal Guohua Yuekan 國畫月刊 (National Painting Monthly), which first appeared in November 1934 and ran to a total of twelve issues before its publication was discontinued due to lack of funding in August 1935.5 It featured contributions on painting history, theory, and art education. The texts were for the most part written by members of the Chinese Painting Association, who were active as painters themselves. The illustrations comprised solely premodern paintings, except for the last issue, which reproduced works by contemporaries, and by some of the journal’s main contributors. The editors’ most ambitious project was the publication of the fourth and fifth issues as a combined “Special Issue on the Ideas of Landscape Painting in China and the West.” One of the stated goals of this special issue was to contribute to the “renaissance of the art of our nation” by comparing the respective advantages and shortcomings of Chinese and Western painting.6 Among the contributors were guohua painters as well as modernist artists and critics, and the articles discussed the histories and theories of Chinese and European landscape painting either separately or from a comparative perspective. Although the majority of the essays assembled seem to be historiographical or theoretical, they ultimately have to be read with regard to their proclaimed goal of a “renaissance” — that is, in the context of guohua practice of the mid-1930s. In the present article, I will focus on three aspects in order to analyse how the histories of Chinese and European landscapes were written in the special issue in relation to contemporary concerns. First, I will briefly sketch the ideological framework of the special issue and discuss its announcement by Xie Haiyan (謝海燕, 1910–2001) and its editorial by Zheng Wu-

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chang (鄭午昌, 1894–1952). In a second step, I will analyse an essay by the art critic Li Baoquan (李寳泉, dates unknown), which addresses the call for comparison. In doing so, I will clarify how the terms of comparison were established, which aspects were compared in the first place, and how these were contingent on the situation of the mid-1930s. Finally, I will investigate two articles by the editor-in-chief He Tianjian (賀天健, 1891–1977), who was also a prominent painter. The first of his essays focuses on premodern Chinese landscape theory and translates it into a modern conceptual framework; the second harshly criticizes contemporary guohua and proposes strategies to change the situation for the better. I will then examine three of He Tianjian’s paintings from the years 1935 and 1936 in order to outline the relations and tensions between his critique and vision of future amelioration, and his actual painting practice.

Announcing the “Special Issue on the Ideas of Landscape Painting in China and the West” The publication of the special issue was announced in the third number by one of the two editors-in-chief, Xie Haiyan. Besides the professional impulse to feature a series of special issues on various topics (which was never realized),7 the choice of topic for this double issue obviously sprang from a feeling of crisis that is pervasive in writings on Chinese painting in the Republican period (1911–1949), and is closely linked to the troubled history of the Chinese state since the last decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and the perception of its political and economic weakness in comparison with Western countries and Japan. In particular, Japanese military expansion in China in the early 1930s sparked nationalist sentiment and a renewed interest in traditionalist art.8 In consonance with early twentieth-century views on the perceived decline of Chinese painting, Xie’s announcement declares that despite landscape painting’s long history in China, it had fallen into decay. In Xie’s view, modern guohua painters did one of two things: They either copied old masters without transforming them, without reflecting the Zeitgeist, and without creating anything new; or they strove for novelty, painting bizarre pictures without foundation in reality or ones that were completely Westernized and oblivious to the national spirit of art. What was needed, according to Xie, was a “New Chinese Painter” (xin Zhongguo huajia 新中國畫家) who would be able to express the spirit of the times as well as national characteristics. This was what the future of China’s cultural renaissance depended upon. The main objectives of the special issue were therefore stated as twofold: (1) to introduce knowledge of Western painting and broaden [the readers’] intellectual horizon, in order to recognize oneself, and to recognize the other, to analyse the respective advantages and shortcomings, and to realize which aspects should be preserved and which should be discarded; (2) to compare the quality of Chinese and Western art, clarify the reasons for their respective rise and decline, to take it as a warning, and strive diligently for the renaissance of the art of our nation.9

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This perspective was also taken up by Zheng Wuchang in his introduction to the special issue on the opening page of number four.10 He refers to the “Manifesto for the Construction of a Culture on China’s Own Terms,” which was published in January 1935 by ten professors, including the historian He Bingsong (何炳松, 1890–1946);11 he claims that this text expressed the common goal of all Chinese, namely to create the culture of a new China. Xie’s announcement, quoted above, while not explicitly referring to the manifesto, follows its rhetoric equally closely. The ten professors expressed a sense of deep cultural crisis, diagnosing that “(in) the field of culture, China has disappeared. … Because in today’s world there is no China, there are seemingly no more Chinese on Chinese soil.”12 As a remedy for the disappearance of a vital Chinese culture that was part of the modern world, they proposed “not to hold on to the old, not to blindly follow [the Euro-American powers], and according to China’s own position, critically and scientifically examine the past, grasp the present and create the future.”13 Zheng Wuchang introduces the Guohua Yuekan special issue as part of this endeavour to build a modern Chinese culture and more specifically, art. However, he phrases it more poetically: He calls upon his colleagues not only to be like spiders spinning their web in a given place, but like bees that fly towards the gardens of Chinese and Western, ancient and modern art, to suck their best nectar and turn it into the outstanding honey of a new era.14 With this metaphor, he refers back to the Chinese Painting Association’s forerunner organization, the Bee Society (Mifeng huashe 蜜蜂畫社, founded in 1929), of which he had been the backbone.15 This art society, many of whose core members became important members of the Chinese Painting Association, had given the following explanation for its name: “Bees are tiny insects. They like to work collectively and systematically. They collect nectar to serve human beings; get tired but never give up; work hard but do not claim credit; have enormous righteousness. We gather our tiny effort to research art and pick the best essence for the public.”16 The tension between the impulses of cultural defence and cosmopolitanism that characterizes Zheng’s programmatic combination of “art on China’s own terms” and the metaphor of a bee flying around the world’s artistic gardens to collect the best essence, can be traced to the enormous influence of social Darwinism on Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century. This influence began with Yan Fu’s (嚴復, 1854–1921) translation of Thomas Huxley’s (1825–1895) “Evolution and Ethics” in 1895 into classical Chinese under the title Tianyan lun 天演論 (On Evolution).17 In Zheng’s editorial, it is most evident when he writes: “In the process of historical evolution, each period has its own art, and in each period every nation has its characteristic art, which reflects its environmental and historical conditions.”18 The collective activities of the bees, like Xie Haiyan’s above-cited call to “analyse the respective advantages and shortcomings, and to realise which aspects should be preserved and which should be discarded” are seen as necessary for national survival in a moment of political, economic, and cultural crisis. A remark should be added here regarding the presence or absence of Japanese art and art historiography in the pages of the special issue. Recent research has drawn

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attention to the formative role of Japanese scholarship in late-Qing and Republican art historiography.19 On the pages of the special issue, however, Japanese art and scholarship is only mentioned in passing, e. g. when it comes to the impact of Japanese and (purportedly) Chinese art on European painting in the nineteenth century.20 Otherwise it is out of focus, as is evidenced by the imbalance in the title of the special issue, “Ideas on Landscape Painting in China and the West.” However, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the attack on Shanghai in 1932 lay at the very base of the pervasive feeling of national crisis that gave birth both to the “Manifesto for the Construction of a Culture on China’s Own Terms”21 and the Guohua Yuekan special issue. Japanese art, scholarship, and, most of all, imperialism therefore underlie the essays as a suppressed presence. Zheng Wuchang’s editorial statement makes clear that the ultimate objective of the special issue is not historical or theoretical, but practical.22 Therefore it is not sufficient to analyse the texts for what they purport to be — discussions of the history or theories of Chinese landscape painting and of European landscape painting before and after the impressionists; and articles that, either implicitly or explicitly, take a comparative approach to Chinese and Western painting. To fully understand the meaning of the articles in relation to Zheng and Xie’s programmatic statements, they also have to be read in relation to contemporary painting practice. Many of the authors writing for the special issue were members of the Chinese Painting Association and frequent contributors to Guohua Yuekan. The editors-in-chief, He Tianjian and Xie Haiyan, contributed three and two articles respectively; Zheng Wuchang authored one more piece besides the introduction; Yu Jianhua (俞劍華, 1895–1979) wrote two essays; and Huang Binhong (黃賓虹, 1865–1955) was represented with one shorter piece and the last section of a theoretical text published in three parts. Other authors, by contrast, were trained in oil painting: Ni Yide (倪怡德, 1901–1970) was a leading member of the modernist art group Storm Society (Juelan she 決瀾社), with which the critic Li Baoquan was loosely associated; Chen Baoyi (陳抱一, 1893–1945), who like Ni Yide had spent some years studying in Japan, was also active in Shanghai’s modernist art circles; the French-trained essayist and professor of the Hangzhou West Lake Art School, Sun Fuxi (孫福熙, 1898–1962), and the critic Chen Yingmei (陳影梅, d. 1982) also specialized in “Western painting” (xiyanghua 西洋畫). These differences in the authors’ chosen artistic medium and training clearly influenced the approaches taken in their respective contributions. As Li Weiming has remarked, the guohua artists who were the editors responsible for the journal commonly held a rather pessimistic and defensive view on the future of Chinese painting while nonetheless claiming a superior position for this tradition. On the other hand, the painters and critics with modernist inclinations were much less troubled by such issues of legitimization.23 For the most part, their accounts follow an established narrative of European art history from Leonardo da Vinci all the way up to the post-impressionists and the Fauves. However, the tensions and frictions that the comparison between two distinct painting traditions entails surfaces in those contributions that answered Xie Haiyan’s call “to compare the quality of

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Chinese and Western art and clarify the reasons for their respective rise and decline,” which was issued in the announcement quoted above. Therefore, I will first analyse one of the “comparatistic” articles, authored by Li Baoquan, in order to locate the terms of comparison and the translatory strategies that enabled a comparison in the first place.

Comparing Landscape Painting in China and the West Li Baoquan wrote two articles for the special issue; one is titled “Western landscape painting after Impressionism” and was published in two parts over the fourth and fifth numbers of Guohua Yuekan.24 Without any reference to Chinese painting, it gives an overview of the major developments in European painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, briefly introducing the work of several painters from Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Paul Cézanne to Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico; it was probably based on European sources.25 His other contribution, printed on more prominent pages within the fourth number, takes a comparative approach. In this essay, entitled “Classicism and Naturalism in Chinese and Western Landscape Painting,”26 Li starts out with the assumption that classicism (gudianzhuyi 古典主義) and naturalism (ziranzhuyi 自 然主義) — both terms being, of course, neologisms in the Chinese language — exist in Chinese as well as in Western European landscape painting. After establishing this “European” framework for his discussion, he turns to the early history of Chinese painting. He situates the beginning of landscape painting in the Tang dynasty (618–906) as a result of the decline of figure painting, and then goes on to describe the foundational moment: At that time painters divided into the Southern and Northern Schools. The Southern School was Wang Wei [王維, 701–761], and he also was the beginner of naturalist painting. The Northern School was Li Sixun [李思訓, fl. c. 705–720], and he was the founder of classicist painting.27

What Li Baoquan recounts here is very similar to the standard version of the theory of the Northern and Southern Schools, established by the late-Ming-dynasty painter, calligrapher, theorist, and high-ranking official Dong Qichang (董其昌, 1555– 1636), albeit without the European terms. The names of these “schools,” which are actually artistic genealogies construed a posteriori, were chosen in analogy with the Southern and Northern Schools of Chan Buddhism, which represent sudden and gradual enlightenment respectively. In painting theory, the Southern School stands for painting by the literati élite, which is privileged over academic and professional modes (the Northern School, fig. 1).28 The scheme of Southern and Northern Schools thus contains a built-in social bias, which Li Baoquan, via his equation of the two schools with naturalism and classicism, transfers onto European painting. The Chinese painters that he cites as representative of the “classicist Northern” and the “naturalist Southern School” are those usually identified with these; the

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Fig. 1: Li Tang (c. 1070–1150), Autumn Landscape, 98.1 × 43.4 cm, Koto-in, Daitoku-ji, Kyoto, reproduced in Guohua yuekan 1/4 (1935) as Wu Daozi, Forest Spring in Remote Valley

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Fig. 2: Claude Lorrain, Landscape with the Rest on the Flight to Egypt, 1647, 102.5 × 135 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, reproduced in Guohua yuekan 1/4 (1935)

former begins with Li Sixun and ends with the painters of the imperial academies of the Song and Ming dynasties; the latter begins with Wang Wei, includes several painters of the Northern Song dynasty, the so-called Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty, and ends with the orthodox literati painters of the early Qing dynasty.29 On the European side, he names four classicists: Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Claude Lorrain (fig. 2), and Nicolas Poussin. Naturalism in European painting begins in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century with Rembrandt, moves on to John Constable and William Turner in England, and finally finds its ultimate expression in French impressionism (fig. 3). The history of painting, Li suggests, necessarily follows the development from figure painting to pure landscape, and classicism is but a deviation along that road. While he regards landscapes by Ni Zan (倪瓚, 1301–1374, fig. 4) as the summit of naturalist expression of the spirit, classicists like Claude Lorrain and Poussin cannot do without human figures. Li makes out two peaks of “naturalism”: Ni Zan’s painting, the paradigm of literati painting from the fourteenth century, and late nineteenth-century European impressionism.

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Fig. 3: Claude Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge, 1874, 60.5 × 80 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, reproduced in Guohua yuekan 1/4 (1935)

The reversed teleology that underlies the implicit equation of these two summits makes sense only in the context of early twentieth-century Chinese debates on the reform of art. It was the lack of mimetic realism and the aloofness of literati painting that was blamed for the crisis of Chinese art and was regarded as symptomatic of national weakness in general.30 Through the equation of Southern School painting with impressionism via the construct of “naturalism,” Li makes a strong case in defence of traditional painting and of literati painting in particular. Impressionism is the central moment around which the accounts of European painting history in the special issue of Guohua Yuekan are organized. Equated with “naturalist” literati painting, it becomes the point of departure from those realist techniques that were regarded as “scientific” in early twentieth-century Chinese discourse. Thus, Li’s essay can be seen as part of a larger movement to rehabilitate literati painting modes via an equation with modernist concepts and styles in Japanese and Chinese art circles of the 1920s and 1930s.31 The reappraisal of practices and concepts characteristic of literati or Southern School painting is as pervasive on the pages of the special issue as is the reference to impressionism. Li’s use of the neologisms “classicism” (gudianzhuyi) and “naturalism” (ziranzhuyi) exemplifies what Lydia Liu has called a “trope of equivalence.” According to Liu, neologism “identi-

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Fig. 4: Ni Zan (1306–1374), Woods and Valleys of Yu, 1372, 94.6 × 35.9 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

fies itself as Chinese and foreign locked in linguistic tension. … [O]ne creates tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of interlinear translation between the host and the guest languages.”32 The “neologistic imagination”33 at work here can be explained as owing to nationalist objectives, primarily the search for the salvation of Chinese culture. By subsuming literati painting under the term “naturalism,” together with impressionism, the two are not only positioned as equivalents, but literati painting, although almost extinct, gains historical priority.34 In this respect, Li’s essay is in keeping with Zheng Wuchang’s explicit and Xie Haiyan’s implicit reference to the “Manifesto for a Chinese Culture on its Own Terms.” However, the very fact that the endpoint of what I have called a reverse teleology lies in the distant past of the fourteenth century is part of the problem that the editors of Guohua Yuekan were trying to resolve with their special issue.

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The History of Chinese Painting as Translingual Practice Since the stated goal of the special issue was to “strive diligently for the renaissance of the art of our nation,”35 those articles that discussed history and cultural comparison also have to be read in light of this overriding aim; historical and comparative issues might even be regarded justifiably as stand-ins for contemporary artistic practice. What is discussed on the pages of Guohua Yuekan is not, or at least not primarily, the question of how to write the painting histories of China and Europe, but rather how to paint modern Chinese paintings. He Tianjian, editor-in-chief of Guohua Yuekan, was also its most prolific author. he contributed three articles to the special issue. I will discuss two of these articles here: the opening essays of the fourth and fifth issues. They reflect on the history and the contemporary situation of Chinese landscape painting in order to probe how the “new Chinese painter” called for by Xie Haiyan in his announcement actually might have been envisioned. Since, as stated above, these theoretical discussions have to be seen as part of a search for practical solutions, I will also discuss He’s paintings from around the same date against the background of the texts in order to shed light on the construction of meaning and the rhetoric strategies used in both texts and paintings. Rather than taking the paintings as illustrations of his theoretical statements, however, I will treat them as a distinct discursive mode that might also bring to light contradictions and tensions between verbal statement and painted practice. He Tianjian’s opening essay of issue number four, “Why Landscape Painting is the Primary Painting Genre in China,”36 is stuffed with quotations from a broad range of historical texts on painting dating from the fifth to the seventeenth centuries, partly cited in full length.37 It shows distinct elements of a historicist approach. At several points, He Tianjian inserts text-critical comments; he remarks that more research has to be done in some cases, or he highlights his reliance on earlier texts in the case of contending versions. He Tianjian also begins his second essay in the same issue, titled “Inquiry into the Origins of Chinese Landscape Painting,”38 with a critical assessment of premodern Chinese painting histories, which he describes as “unsystematic.”39 However, he in fact treats the cited texts in an ahistorical manner. The key concepts of Chinese painting theory that he tries to elucidate through these texts are treated as valid givens. He takes them as evidence for the case he has set out to prove — namely, that landscape has been the most prestigious genre in Chinese painting ever since it became an independent subject matter, and it continues to be in his own time. After citing several premodern sources to serve the point that landscape painting is the primary painting genre, he moves on to discuss the reasons for its importance. He elaborates his argument under two subheadings: “Metaphysics is the vital essence of landscape painting” (Shanshuihua yi xingshangxue wei shengming 山水畫 以形上學為生命), and “The highest attainment in landscape painting is to pass beyond nature” (Shanshuihua yi chao ziran wei jizhi 山水畫以超自然為極致). Under the first heading, He Tianjian argues that for Chinese painters inner cultiva-

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tion is more important than mimetic representation; they are not impeded by outer forms, since the external form is only the result of the movement of inner life (neizai shengming 内在生命). He then equates inner life with inner cultivation (neixiu 内修), referring to a painter’s moral education; the painter’s character, he claims, becomes visible within one brushstroke (yihua 一畫), and that in turn is, according to He, the origin of the concept of qiyun 氣韻, which is commonly translated into English as “spirit resonance.” As an aesthetic concept, qiyun underwent changing interpretations over the course of history. However, since it lies at the centre of the first of the Six Laws of Painting laid down by Xie He in the fifth century — qiyun shengdong 氣韻生動, “spirit resonance which means vitality” — its importance cannot be overstated.40 By linking it to inner cultivation as opposed to mimetic representation, He Tianjian implies the former’s primacy over the latter. He Tianjian then paraphrases the Book of Changes, or Yijing 易經, stating that “the doctrine of what is above form is called the Dao; the doctrine of what is within form is called the tool.”41 However, what I render here as “doctrine of what is above form,” following Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Yijing, xingshang zhi xue 形 上之學 in Chinese, actually comes very close to the neologism that translates the European term “metaphysics,” xing’ershangxue 形而上學.42 He concludes that the Dao is more important than technique (jifa 技法). Then he reiterates that qiyun is not dependent on technique, but on inner cultivation. This rather circular argumentation results in the equation of the concepts of inner life/inner cultivation, qiyun and the Dao, as opposed to outer form, technique, and tools. Finally, he adds another concept from literati painting theory to the equation, that of yi 意, commonly translated as “idea” or “concept.” He defines yi as “what in psychology is called ‘imagination’ (jiaxiang 假象),” and elucidates his point with a quotation from the eleventh-century treatise Lofty Message of Forests and Streams (Linquan gaozhi 林泉高致) by Guo Xi (郭熙, ca. 1001–1090). Then he stresses again that in order to express yi, a high degree of inner cultivation is necessary.43 To sum up, what He Tianjian puts forward here is the classical literati argument, the argument which also lies at the basis of the Southern/Northern School dichotomy discussed by Li Baoquan: that the expression of a painter’s cultivation through the brushstroke is more important for a painting’s quality than formal resemblance or representational techniques, and that landscape painting is the genre which is best suited for this mode of expression. What he leaves unmentioned in his equation is what might be the opposite term of yi. The opposite of xieyi 寫意 (literally, “to express the idea”) in early twentieth-century discourse would be xieshi 寫實 (literally, “to transmit the substantial”): realism. And it is actually this void, created by the omission of realism, that lies at the centre of He’s argumentation and is essential to the second part of his essay, “The Highest Attainment in Landscape Painting is to Pass beyond Nature.” Here realism is introduced under the guise of “form-likeness” (xingsi 形似). The second part opens with a quotation from Zhang Yanyuan’s (張彥遠, fl. 9th c.) Lidai minghua ji 歷代名畫記, expressing the opinion that painting may disregard form-likeness, but not qiyun.44 The important point again is that painting is not about the representation of “landscape (the nat-

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ural object)” (shanshui [ziran duixiang] 山水[自然對象]), but about its transformation (bian 變) through brushwork.45 In the end, his argumentation is very close to that of Li Baoquan in the essay quoted above, although they use the word “nature” (ziran) in quite opposite ways. While Li Baoquan terms literati landscape painting as “naturalist” (ziranzhuyi), He Tianjian claims that it is beyond nature (chaoziran), or metaphysical. These contending interpretations of related concepts show how terminology was used in a very flexible way as long as it could be made to fit the respective ideological argument. Similar to Li Baoquan’s article, He’s essay is an exercise in what Lydia Liu has called “translingual practice.” According to Liu, translingual practice occurs in “the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the host language due to, or in spite of, the latter’s contact/collision with the guest language.” This conceptual approach emphasizes the invention of meaning and takes translation as the site “where the irreducible differences between [host and guest language] are fought out, authorities invoked or challenged, ambiguities dissolved or created, and so forth, until new words and meanings emerge in the host language itself.” 46 Throughout He Tianjian’s article, the core terms of premodern Chinese painting theory are equated with modern concepts and are thereby translated into a new conceptual framework. This modern framework, however, is simultaneously explained in the terms of classical Chinese painting texts. It is therefore impossible to determine if these conceptual frameworks are superseding one another; the text oscillates between both, and effectively blends them, as in He’s citation of the Daoist source for the neologism “metaphysics” or when he annotates “landscape” (shanshui) as “natural object.” He also employs evolutionist terminology when he literally frames a full-length quotation of Zong Bing’s (宗炳, 374–443) Hua shanshui xu 畫山水序 (“Preface to Landscape Painting”) with the terms “potentiality” (chuneng 儲能) and “fruition” (xiaoshi 效實), which were coined by Yan Fu in his adaptation of Huxley’s On Evolution and Ethics.47 He Tianjian differs from Li Baoquan in that he makes no reference to European painting; obviously, his sole aim is to reconcile Chinese painting practice and its large body of theory with modern artistic concepts translated from the European tradition such as “imagination” (jiaxiang), “genius” (tiancai 天才), or “art” (yishu 藝術).

Diagnosing and Curing the Diseases of Chinese Painting In the text that opens the fifth number, or second part of the special issue, He Tianjian directly addresses the problems haunting his contemporaries. In this text, titled “The Symptoms of Morbidity in Contemporary Chinese Landscape Painting and Methods of Rescue,”48 he lists several symptoms of a perceived state of illness in contemporary painting and makes suggestions about how to set about healing.

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He diagnoses the symptoms as: (1) to think that when you closely copy the works of the ancients you won’t lose the ancient method; (2) to think that an enlarged copy of a print reproduction is already a work of your own; (3) to mistake eclecticism for an original work; (4) to mistake smearing around for an original work; (5) to be ignorant of [the paintings of ] the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties and think you can do an original work on your own; (6) to think that using Western painting methods in Chinese painting makes up for an original work.49

These six symptoms are linked to six causes — to exploit one’s personality, and to be ignorant of method; not to engage in study, and to rest confined within the methods of the ancients; to practice copying without engaging with theory; not to study thoroughly; to be overly self-confident and eagerly follow fashions; to blindly follow others. The first three, He writes, are caused by not reading or by reading without understanding, while the latter three apply to those who don’t even know what the word “learning” means.50 He Tianjian’s critique can be pinned down to the following points: blind copying of either premodern Chinese or Western paintings without generating original works, being overly innovative without a solid foundation in traditional painting techniques, and a lack of theoretical foundation. The remedy that he proposes is seemingly rather conservative. As he does not have much faith in his own generation, he suggests the following training for future generations of painters: The first step is to make tracing copies of ancient paintings, but only of the outlines in order to practice brushwork; at the same time large and small seal script and the style of the stele inscriptions of the (Northern) Wei dynasty (386–535) should be practiced; besides this technical training, students must read ancient painting treatises. For this foundational period of training, He Tianjian allots a time span of three years. The second step is to make freehand copies of ancient paintings in order to practice ink technique, and to read more theoretical works, for the duration of four years. After these seven years students may start creating original work. There are three ways in which they can set about doing this, either step by step or at the same time, according to opportunity and circumstance: They should (1) explore and transform the formal means of the ancients; (2) study the historical development of different schools and theories; (3) travel through famous mountains and great rivers to explore the sources of ancient painting. This should be practiced for another ten years.51 He Tianjian’s understanding of what constitutes “Chinese painting,” as it can be glimpsed from his diagnosis and his propositions for a cure, is based on the work of premodern painting masters, whose modes, techniques, and theoretical work should form the basis of modern Chinese painting practice. The practices of orthodox literati painting that were so harshly attacked in the early twentieth century seem to have emerged unaffected, since the main “disease” consists of their not being put to

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correct use in instances of uncreative copying from paintings and collotype reproductions. However, the modes and techniques of the ancients are linked to the ground of the visual experience of real landscape. He Tianjian assumes that travels through famous mountains and rivers were the initial foundation of early landscape painting and identifies the re-enactment of this purported experience as one of the formative exercises for the advanced student of painting. As Yi Gu has shown, outdoor sketching, or xiesheng 寫生, was first conceived as the hallmark of modern painting practice that was based on the “scientific” methods of Western drawing. By the late 1920s, guohua artists, such as Hu Peiheng, had adopted the concept and identified it as underlying early Chinese painting from the Tang and Song dynasties. By the 1930s, outdoor sketching became a widespread practice among guohua artists, and it was regarded as a major remedy against the unwholesome practices of self-referentially engaging with the brush modes of earlier painters.52

He Tianjian’s Paintings of the Mid-1930s and the Style of the Song and Yuan Supposing that He Tianjian took his own painting practice as the role model for the above-mentioned training programme, an analysis of his paintings from the mid1930s may shed light on how he envisioned the future of Chinese painting. One work may be of particular relevance here because it was reproduced in Guohua Yuekan. As a rule, no works by contemporary painters were reproduced in the journal; the only exception to this rule was the last issue, the double number 11/12. The illustrations here included two paintings by He Tianjian, both given the plain title Landscape (Shanshui 山水) and dated 1935. One painting shows a small boat on Xuanwu Lake with the Nanjing city wall in the background, the other is a mountainscape. The latter was later published under the title Town Wall by a River and Floating Clouds (fig. 5, pl. XV).53 According to the inscription, it depicts a scene that He had seen in a dream the night before. He dreamed of climbing a steep mountain path and of passing beyond the clouds. The swirling “heads” of the clouds are described as an exceptionally strange and fantastic view (qiguan 奇觀). Accordingly, the dream-like quality is conveyed in the painting mainly by the band of billowing clouds streaming down the mountainside like a waterfall. The dreamer can be identified as one of the donkey riders about to enter their whiteness. The strangeness of the view is also underscored by the twisted rock formation leading up to the main peak and by the transparent palette of green and ochre. The twisted rocks are reminiscent of the seventeenth-century individualist painter Shitao (石濤, 1642–1707), whose painting Cinnabar Cliff and Deep Valley (fig. 6) was reproduced in the fourth number of Guohua Yuekan as an illustration to He Tianjian’s article “Why Landscape Painting is the primary Painting Genre in China.”54 This reference is efficacious in conveying the notion of the qiguan, the strange and fantastic view. The pictorial idiom associated with Shitao is also regarded as a highly personalized experience of perception, which again is very apt for conveying a dream-like vision.

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Fig. 5: He Tianjian, Landscape (Town Wall by a River and Floating Clouds), 1935, 121 × 44 cm, present collection unknown, reproduced in Guohua yuekan 1/11–12 (1935)

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Fig. 6: Shitao (1642–1707), Cinnebar Cliff and Deep Valley, 104.5 x 165.2 cm, Beijing, Palace Museum, reproduced in Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935)

However, Shitao is not the main stylistic reference in the painting; of more relevance is the idiom of Northern Song and Yuan painting, synthesized by the socalled orthodox literati painters of the seventeenth century to become the hallmark style of the Southern School. He Tianjian later claimed in his autobiography that sometime during the 1920s he cast aside the style of the “Four Wang”55 that epitomized orthodoxy in painting and was still widely practiced in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the freehand style practiced by followers of Shitao, and instead modelled his painting after the styles of the Song and Yuan masters.56 However, as evidenced by his paintings from the 1930s, He’s conception of these styles was shaped by orthodox transmission and interpretation. The composition, the pictorial elements, and the brush mode in Town Wall by a River and Floating Clouds and other contemporary paintings such as Mountain Pass (fig. 7, pl. XVI) painted in the following year can be traced to Yuan dynasty precedents. Both paintings cite the signature Southern School composition of mountains built of small, round boulders topped by dark vegetation, and the surfaces of the mountain sides are modelled with the long texture strokes that are associated with the style of Huang Gongwang (黃公望, 1269–1354). The clearly drawn paths that wind steeply up the mountains in Mountain Pass, including travellers and a roofed bridge, are clear references to another Yuan master, Wu Zhen (吳鎮, 1280–1354),

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Fig. 7: He Tianjian, Mountain Pass, 1936, 179.8 × 69.2 cm, Beijing, National Art Museum of China

as exemplified in a seventeenth-century copy of a painting attributed to him from the album To See the Large Within the Small. This set of reduced-size copies of Songand Yuan-period masterpieces was painted by Wang Hui (王翬, 1632–1717), one of the Four Wangs whose style He claimed to have rejected in favour of earlier

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Fig. 8: Wang Hui (1632–1717), attr., copy after Wu Zhen (1280–1354), “Mountain Pass on a Clear Autumn Day,” leaf from the album To See the Large Within the Small, Shanghai Museum

models (fig. 8).57 The stylistic synthesis of this album, which is characteristic of Wang, is a precursor to the blending of canonical styles by He Tianjian. The modelling of the main peak in He’s painting, with dense vegetation on its top, points to yet another emblematic style, that of Fan Kuan (范寬,d. after 1032) of the Northern Song dynasty. Again, He’s interpretation of this style is closer to Wang Hui’s copy of Fan’s Travellers between Mountains and Streams in the album To See the Large Within the Small (fig. 9) than to the eleventh-century original. In the inscription to Mountain Pass, however, He Tianjian refers to neither Fan Kuan nor Wu Zhen. Instead, he claims for himself the even earlier models of the tenth-century painters Jing Hao (荊浩) and Guan Tong (關仝), juxtaposing them with the “school” of the Yuan literati painters Huang Gongwang and Ni Zan and stating that he always finds the latter too unassuming (ping 平). While the composition of Mountain Pass corresponds to the monumentality associated with the Jing (Hao) and Guan (Tong) mode, the inscription effectively serves to disavow the actual models that the painting cites, especially when He proudly states that paintings emerge from under his brush as created by nature.

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Fig. 9: Wang Hui (1632–1717) attr., copy after Fan Kuan (11th century), “Travellers between Mountains and Streams,” leaf from the album To See the Large Within the Small , Shanghai-Museum

The synthesizing of different styles is also apparent in the brushwork that He employed in Mountain Pass. It is basically grounded on the hemp-fibre texture strokes (pimacun 披麻皴), the hallmark cun, or texture stroke, of literati painting, but in some places it is applied with sharp, fluid strokes that turn the soft quality of the hemp-fibre cun into hard-edged crispness. These elongated crisp strokes appear in many of He’s paintings from the 1930s; in the painting Donkey Rider, also dated 1936, these strokes dominate the loosely painted composition (fig. 10). In the inscription he explains them as follows: Wang Meng (王蒙, ca. 1308–1385), he writes, had used seal script technique (zhuanfa 篆法) in his painting, thus establishing his own style. He himself combined the techniques of cursive script (caoshu 草書) with the methods of the Song and Yuan masters, thereby establishing a new path. By placing himself on a par with one of the Four Masters of the Yuan in claiming to create a new style, He himself successfully avoids the potential “disease” of blind copying. The majority of He Tianjian’s works from before 1949 do not explicitly link to specific places; therefore the last aspect of his education programme for future generations of Chinese painters, “to travel through the famous mountains and great rivers to explore the sources of ancient painting,” can only be related to his paint-

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Fig. 10: He Tianjian, Donkey Rider, 1936, 115 × 38 cm, Shanghai, Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting

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ings more indirectly. In her study of He’s conceptualization of texture strokes, Yi Gu has analysed how the painter sought out the sources for the strongly canonized texture-strokes in the surfaces of factual mountains.58 In his essay, “The Landscape of Eastern Zhejiang Confirms the Painting Tradition,”59 published in the travel anthology Dongnan lansheng 東南攬勝 (In Search of the Southeast, 1935) together with a painting of his visit to the Five Cataracts (Wuxie 五洩), He identifies the cun of a variety of ancient painting masters, describing the landscape almost entirely in terms of canonized brush modes. As Yi Gu has remarked, the “long list of pre-modern painters … was not random, but instead paved the way for his conclusion, which reiterated the dominant historiography of the landscape painting tradition in a ‘scientific’ manner. He declared that the peaks at the Five Cataracts … [were] demonstrations of the cun models of the Song and Yuan masters in nature.”60 Put differently, landscape painting does not need to be adapted in order to comply with a more “realistic” or “true-to-nature” representation, but mountains and rivers serve to confirm and reinforce the techniques and modes of premodern painting. This blending of observed landscape forms with historical and highly coded painting styles and the understanding of one through the other also surfaces in He’s idealized landscapes that do not refer to specific topographies. Because they are now conceptually linked to the visual and material quality of rocky and earthen surfaces, many of He Tianjian’s landscapes in his Song-Yuan manner61 become sound and massive, with a thoroughly defined visibility even in the details of the background. This is a moment where the missing point in his argumentation of why landscape painting should be regarded as the primary painting genre can be reintroduced: the xieshi 寫實 as opposed to the xieyi 寫意 (i.e. the realistic as opposed to the conceptual). But shi 實 in premodern painting discourse mainly carries the meaning of solid form as opposed to the empty (xu 虛). And while He Tianjian’s landscapes of the 1930s are by no means realistic, his monumental mountains are solid and in sharp focus. The close attention to surface and visibility stands in stark contrast to his argumentation about the unimportance of outer forms in relation to inner movement. In his article, He Tianjian uses the theoretical underpinnings of literati painting to position himself within a lineage of painters whose diverse stylistic idioms he synthesizes into a national form of painting, but in his paintings he brings these idioms down to the solid ground of observed surface and thereby into the visual paradigm of modernity in China. To say it using the rhetoric of Zheng Wuchang’s editorial to the special issue, He Tianjian conceptualizes his own painting “on China’s terms.” But he is measuring and redefining these terms against the paradigms of modernity, many of which were translated from the “West.” One of these paradigms is the observation of “true mountains and true waters” through outdoor sketching, which resulted in He’s dismissal of the Four Wang, as well as the seventeenth-century individualists, in favour of Song and Yuan painting as a point of reference; another is the striving for innovation. The tensions and seeming contradictions in the arguments of He and others — brought about by the desire to identify with the early origins of Chinese

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landscape painting while subscribing to evolutionist thinking — are, using He’s metaphor, at the same time “cause” and “symptom” of the feeling of crisis that gave birth to the special issue of Guohua Yuekan.

Notes 1 Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen give 1931 as the year when the association was established. Andrews and Shen, “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s to 1930s, ed. Jason Kuo (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 79–93, 80. This is the information given in Wang Yichang 王扆昌, Zhonghua minguo sanshiliu nian Zhongguo meishu nianjian 中華民國三十六年中國美術年鑒 (1947 Art Year Book of China), (Shanghai, 1948, repr. Shanghai: Shanghai Shehui Kexueyuan Chubanshe, 2008), 8, and, obviously based on the 1947 Art Year Book, by Xu Zhihao 許志浩, Zhongguo meishu shetuan manlu 中國美術社團漫錄 (Shanghai: Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 1994), 118–119. I follow Pedith Chan in taking 1932 as the date of establishment, based on the fact that the inaugural meeting took place in June 1932, cf. Chan, “The Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua 國畫: Art Societies in Republican Shanghai,” Modern China 20/10 (2013), 1–30, here 22. 2 Chan, “The Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua” (cf. note 1), 18; Andrews and Shen, “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity” (cf. note 1), 83. 3 Lu Danlin, “Guohuajia jiying lianhe 國畫家亟應聯合,” Mifeng huabao 蜜蜂畫報 (1930), repr. as “Minguo shijiu nian Zhongguo huahui yuanqi 民國十九年中國畫會緣起” in Wang, Zhonghua minguo sanshiliu nian Zhongguo meishu nianjian (cf. note 1), 8; trans. after Andrews and Shen, “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity” (cf. note 1), 85. 4 On the activities and the organizational structure of the Chinese Painting Society, see Chan, “The Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua” (cf. note 1), 19–24. Cf. Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2012), 98–103. 5 Li Weiming 李偉銘, “Jindai yujing zhong de ‘shanshui’ yu ‘fengjing’ — Yi Guohua Yuekan ‘Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuanhao’ wei zhongxin 近代語境中的‘山水’與‘風 景’ —  — 以《國畫月刊》‘中西山水畫思想專號’為中心,” Wenyi Yanjiu 1 (2006), 107– 120, here 107–108. Numbers 9–10 and 11–12 appeared as double issues. 6 (Xie) Haiyan (謝)海燕, “Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuanhao fakan qian tan 中西山水畫思 想專號發刊前談,” Guohua yuekan 1/3 (1935), 48. 7 Ibid., 48. 8 Cf. Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China (cf. note 4), 98–99, on nationalist tones in the Chinese Painting Association. 9 Xie, “Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuanhao fakan qian tan” (cf. note 6), 48. 10 Zheng Wuchang 鄭午昌, “Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuankan zhanwang 中西山水畫思想 專刊展望,” Guohua yuekan 1/4 (1935), opening page. 11 Wang Xinming 王新命 et al., “Zhongguo benwei de wenhua jianshe xuanyan 中國本位的文化建 設宣言,” Wenhua Jianshe 1/4 (January 1935), repr. Dongfang Zazhi 32/4 (1935), 81–83. On the manifesto, see Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2001), 152–156; Wang translates the title as “Declaration of the Construction of a China-based Culture.” He Bingsong’s name was the second on the list of signers, but according to Wang he was the key figure and was also perceived as such by the public (ibid., 153). This corresponds to Zheng Wuchang’s reference to him as main author of the manifesto. 12 Wang, “Zhongguo benwei de wenhua jianshe xuanyan” (cf. note 11), 81. 13 Ibid., 83. 14 Zheng Wuchang, “Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuankan zhanwang” (cf. note 10). 15 Chan, “The Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua” (cf. note 1), 17.

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16 Mifeng huashe sheyoulu 蜜蜂畫社社友錄 (Shanghai 1930), unpag. trans. after Chan, “The Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua” (cf. note 1), 15. 17 On Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun, see Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 90–112. 18 Zheng Wuchang, “Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuankan zhanwang” (cf. note 10). 19 Aida Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Japanese Impact on the Republican Art World: The Construction of Chinese Art History as a Modern Field,” Twentieth-Century China 32/1 (2006), 4–35; Guo Hui, Writing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China (PhD dissertation, Leiden: Univ. of Leiden, 2010); Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2012). 20 Sun Fuxi 孫福熙, “Xiyanghua zhong de fengjing 西洋畫中的風景,” Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 86–87, here 87. Li Weiming has also remarked this omission of Japan in the special issue, Li, “Jindai yujing zhong de ‘shanshui’ yu ‘fengjing’” (cf. note 5), 113 and 115. 21 Cf. Wang, Inventing China through History (cf. note 11), 152. 22 A similar observation has been made by Huaiyin Li for modern Chinese historiography: “The historians who wrote about modern China, ranging from the first generation that enthused about the making of “New History” under the influence of social Darwinism in the 1920s to the latest generation …, all linked their studies of China’s recent past with the stated purpose of national salvation and strengthening or the explicit political agendas of specific groups. … As active participants in a revolutionary or reform movement, they used their interpretations of the past to give the movement a teleological meaning, to shape its guideline and direction, and to inspire future actions of its participants.” Huaiyin Li, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 6. 23 Li, “Jindai yujing zhong de ‘shanshui’ yu ‘fengjing’” (cf. note 5), 116. 24 Li Baoquan, “Yinxiangpai yihou de xiyang fengjinghua 印象派以後的西洋風景畫,” Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 92–93; and 1/5 (1935), 115–118. 25 None of the authors cites his sources; the only exception is Xie Haiyan, who states that his article on “The Origin of the Ideas of Chinese Landscape Painting” is based on a text by the Japanese author Matsushima Shūe 松島宗衛 (1871–1935), Xie Haiyan 謝海燕, “Zhongguo shanshuihua sixiang de yuanyuan 中國山水畫思想的淵源,” Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 61–66, here 66. For a list of art history textbooks that were translated into Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s, see Guo, Writing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China (cf. note 19), 188–189. 26 Li Baoquan 李寳泉, “Zhongxi shanshuihua de gudianzhuyi yu ziranzhuyi 中西山水畫的古典 主義與自然主義,” Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 57–59. 27 Ibid., 57. 28 On Dong Qichang’s theory of the Southern and Northern Schools, cf. Wai-kam Ho: “Tung Ch’ich’ang’s New Orthodoxy and the Southern School Theory” in Artists and Traditions: Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture, ed. Christian F. Murck (Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton Univ., 1976), 113–129; James Cahill, “Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s ‘Southern and Northern Schools’ in the History and Theory of Painting: A Reconsideration” in Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought, ed. Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), 429– 446; Wen C. Fong, “Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and Artistic Renewal” in The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636), ed. Wai-kam Ho, vol. 1 (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1992), 43–54. 29 Li, “Zhongxi shanshuihua de gudianzhuyi yu ziranzhuyi” (cf. note 26), 58: “The classicist Northern School in Chinese painting begins with the Elder General Li Sixun [李思訓, fl. ca. 705–720] of the Tang (period), afterwards it included Guo Zhongshu [郭忠恕, dates unknown] et alia and had its heyday in the imperial academies of the Song and Ming. As for the painters of the naturalist Southern School, beginning with Wang Wei [701–761] as the founder of landscape painting as ‘expression of one’s natural character (zhao ziran zhi xing 肇自然之性),’ they later included Jing [Jing Hao 荊浩, dates unknown] and Guan [Guan Tong 關仝, ca. 907–960] of the Five Dynasties, Dong [Dong Yuan 董源, ?–ca. 962], Wen [Wen Tong 文同, 1018–1079], Mi [Mi Fu 米芾, 1051–1107], and Su [Su Shi 蘇軾, 1037–1101] of the Song; with Wang [Wang Meng 王 蒙, 1308 or 1298–1385], Huang [Huang Gongwang 黃公望, 1269–1354], Ni [Ni Zan 倪瓚,

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1301–1374], and Wu [Wu Zhen 吳鎮, 1280–1354] as the Four Masters of the Yuan, it can be said that naturalist landscape painting in China had already reached its unsurpassable apogee. As for Shen Shitian [Shen Zhou 沈周, 1427–1509] and Dong Qichang [董其昌, 1555–1636] of the Ming, they already mark the beginning of a decline. The Four Wang, Wu [Wu Li 吳歷, 1632–1718] and Yun [Yun Shouping 惲壽平, 1633–1690] of the early Qing are like the last reflections of the Southern School, and maybe of the whole of Chinese painting, before its present slipping into darkness.” This early twentieth-century state of mind is probably most succinctly expressed in Chen Duxiu’s (陳獨秀, 1879–1942) often-cited statement: “To reform Chinese painting one has to revolutionise the style sanctioned by Wang Shigu 王石谷 [Wang Hui 王翬, 1632–1717], and one has to adopt the realist spirit of Western painting. While Wang Shigu’s paintings have been described as the epitome of previous schools, I would treat them as the outcome of the bad paintings [produced] since Ni Zan, Huang Gongwang, Wen Zhengming [文徵明, 1470–1559], and Shen Zhou … If it cannot be overthrown, the canon they have formed will become the major barrier for importing Realism.” (Chen Duxiu, “Meishu geming — Da Lü Zheng 美術革命 — 答呂徵,” Xin Qingnian 6/1 (Jan., 1919), trans. after David Der-wei Wang, “In the Name of the Real” in Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, ed. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 28–59, here 40. Wong, Parting the Mists (cf. note 19), 54–76. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity–– China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 40. Ibid. This perceived equivalence between literati painting modes and modern(ist) painting can also be found in more recent writings on Chinese painting, e.g. in Wen C. Fong’s reading of Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Twin Pines, Level Distance (early 1300s) along Clement Greenberg’s definition of modernist painting as “art calling attention to art” (Fong, Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert Hatfield Ellsworth Collection (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 18. On the comparisons of Yuan painting with modernist painting in American post-Second World War art historiography, see also Richard Vinograd, “De-Centering Yuan Painting” in “Current Directions in Yuan Painting,” special issue, Ars Orientalis 37 (2009), 195–212, here 198–199. Xie, “Zhongxi shanshuihua sixiang zhuanhao fakan qian tan” (cf. note 6), 48. He Tianjian 賀天健, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong da tou zhi lunzheng 中國山水畫 在畫科中打頭之論證,” Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 51–56. This is the case with Zong Bing’s (宗炳, 374–443) “Preface on Landscape Painting” (Hua shanshui xu 畫山水序) (He, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong da tou zhi lunzheng” (cf. note 36), 53) and with Shitao’s (1642–1707) chapter on “Brush and Ink” (Bimo zhang 筆墨章) from his Remarks on Painting by the Monk Bitter Melon (Kugua heshang huayulu 苦瓜和尚話語錄) (ibid., 55). A long quotation from Guo Ruoxu’s (郭若虛, dates unknown) Tuhua jianwen zhi 圖 畫見聞志 (Record of my Experiences in Painting, 1074) is also included (ibid., 53). He Tianjian, “Zhongguo shanshuihua lanshang shiqi de tuikao 中國山水畫濫觴時期的推考,” Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 67–70. This essay focuses on early landscape theory; since its references to the author’s own time and practice are less obvious, it will not be treated at length here. Ibid., 67. The translation cited here is by William R. B. Acker, Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1954 and 1974), I, 4. For a summary of the various interpretation of the Six Laws, and of the concept of qiyun in particular, in historical texts on painting and by modern scholars, see Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds., Early Chinese Texts on Painting, 2nd edition (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2012), 10–16. For the translation and discussion of an interpretation of qiyun that is similar to He Tianjian’s, by his contemporary Wang Yachen (汪亞塵, 1894–1983), also a contributor to Guohua Yuekan, see Wong, Parting the Mists (cf. note 19), 74–76. He, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong da tou zhi lunzheng” (cf. note 36), 54: “夫形上之 學謂之道,形下之學謂之器”. For the original quotation from the Yijing, cf. Zhou Yi 周易, annotated by Zhu Xi 朱熹, Zhongguo wenhua jingdian (Hangzhou: Xiling Yinshe Chubanshe,

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2007), part 1, vol. 5, 77: “是故形而上者謂之道，形而下者謂之器,” or The I Ching or Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XIX (New York: Pantheon Books, 1950), vol. 1, 347: “What is above form is called tao; what is within form is called tool.” Liu, Translingual Practice (cf. note 32), Appendix D, 325, where xing’ershang is listed as “return graphic loan,” a term referring to “classical Chinese-character compounds that were used by the Japanese to translate modern European words and were reintroduced into modern Chinese.” (ibid., 302.) He, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong da tou zhi lunzheng” (cf. note 36), 54. Ibid. Ibid., 55–56. He actually inserts the term “natural object” into Dong Qichang’s famous dictum that “With regard to the exceptionality of scenery, painting cannot compare with landscape (the natural object), but with regard to the marvels of brush and ink, landscape cannot compare with painting.” Cf. Dong Qichang, “Huachanshi lun hua: Huazhi 畫禪室論畫: 畫旨” in Zhongguo hualun leibian 中國古代畫論類編, ed. Yu Jianhua 俞劍華, 2nd edition (Beijing: Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1998), vol. 2, 724. To make his point about the transformative qualities of brushwork, He Tianjian quotes Shitao’s chapter on “Brush and Ink” from his Kugua heshang huayulu at full length. Liu, Translingual Practice (cf. note 32), 26. He, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong da tou zhi lunzheng” (cf. note 36), 52–53. For a later, critical discussion of Yan Fu’s translation and use of these two terms by the renowned scientist Ren Hongjuan (任鸿隽, 1886–1961) see idem, “Kexue fanyi wenti — Cong Yan yi Tianyan lun shuoqi 科學翻譯問題 — 從嚴譯天演論說起,” Kexue 3 (1959), 178–180, here 178. He Tianjian, “Zhongguo shanshuihua jinri zhi bingtai ji qi jiuji fangfa 中國山水畫今日之病態 及其救濟方法,” Guohua Yuekan 1/5 (1935), 100–103. Ibid., 100–101. Ibid., 102. Ibid. Yi Gu, Scientizing Vision in China: Photography, Outdoor Sketching, and the Reinvention of Landscape Perception, 1912–1949 (PhD dissertation, Providence, RI: Brown University, 2009), 58– 101. He Tianjian huaji 賀天健畫集 (Shanghai: Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1982), pl. 13. The painting was sold at auction in 2004; Jinghua Art Auctions, Shanghai 上海敬华艺术品拍卖有限公 司, Spring Auction: Shanghai School Painting and Calligraphy, 15 April 2004, lot no. 60, cf. http://auction.artron.net/paimai-art25760060 (accessed 12 February 2015). He, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong da tou zhi lunzheng” (cf. note 36), 55. These are Wang Shimin (王時敏, 1592–1680), Wang Jian (王鑑, 1598–1677), Wang Hui (王翬, 1632–1717), and Wang Yuanqi (王原祁, 1642–1715). He Tianjian, Xue hua shanshui guocheng zishu 學畫山水過程自述 (Beijing: Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1962), 20–21. On the enduring popularity of the Four Wangs style in the Shanghai art market of the Republican period, see Pedith Chan, “Art in the Marketplace: Taste, Sale, and Transformation of Guohua in Republican Shanghai” in The Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond: Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Art, ed. Rui Oliveira Lopes (Lisboa: Centro de Investigacão e Estudos em Belas-Artes (CIEBA), Universidade de Lisboa, 2013), 72–104, here 92–95. Wang Hui’s album, now in the Shanghai Museum, is probably a copy of the earliest version of the To See the Large Within the Small album, attributed to Wang Shimin and in the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei. For a study of this earlier album, see Wang Ching-Ling 王靜靈, “Jianli dianfan: Wang Shimin yu Xiao zhong xian da ce 建立典範:王時敏與《小中現大冊》,” Meishushi Yanjiu Jikan 29 (2008), 175–258, on the relation between the two versions see ibid., 179. Gu, Scientizing Vision in China (cf. note 52), 152–164. He Tianjian, “Zhedong shanshui zai huaxue shang zhi zhengyan ji 淛東山水在畫學上之證驗 記” in Dongnan lansheng 東南攬勝, ed. Dongnan jiaotong zhoulanhui xuanchuanzu 東南交通 周覽會宣傳組 (n. p.: Quanguo Jingji Weiyuanhui Dongnan Jiaotong Zhoulanhui 1935), chapter “Zazu bu,” 3–5.

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60 Gu, Scientizing Vision in China (cf. note 52), 163. 61 Other examples include Lofty Scholar in Southern Mountains 南山高隱圖 (1937), in He Tianjian huaji 賀天健畫集 (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1957), 6, and Layered Peaks and Winding Ridges 峰疊嶺迴 (undated, probably 1930s), in He Tianjian huaji 賀天健畫集 (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1982), pl. 13.

Illustrations Fig. 1: Li Tang 李唐 (ca. 1070–1150), Autumn Landscape 秋景山水, hanging scroll, ink on silk, 98.1 x 43.4 cm, Kyoto, Daitoku-ji, Koto-in [reproduced from: Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Eighth–Fourteenth Century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 208]. Reproduced in Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 60, as Wu Daozi 吳道子 (fl. ca. 710–760): Forest Spring in Remote Valley 幽谷林泉. Fig. 2: Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), Landscape with the Rest on the Flight to Egypt, 1647, oil on canvas, 102.5 x 135 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister [reproduced from: Michail Alpatov, Die Dresdner Galerie: Alte Meister (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1966), pl. 213]. Reproduced in Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 59. Fig. 3: Claude Monet (1840–1926), The Argenteuil Bridge, 1874, oil on canvas, 60.5 x 80 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay [reproduced from: Claude Monet. 1840–1926, ed. Guy Cogeval et al., exhibition catalogue Galeries Nationales, Grand Palais, Paris (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2010), 136, cat. 35]. Reproduced in Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 79. Fig. 4: Ni Zan 倪瓚 (1306–1374), Woods and Valleys of Yu 虞山林壑, 1372, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 94.6 x 35.9 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art [www.metmuseum. org]. Fig. 5: He Tianjian 賀天健 (1891–1977), Landscape (Town Wall by a River and Floating Clouds 江 城行雲), 1935, hanging scroll, ink and colour on paper, 121 x 44 cm, present collection unknown [reproduced from: He Tianjian huaji 賀天健畫集 (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1982), pl. 13]. Reproduced in Guohua yuekan 1/11–12 (1935), 223. Fig. 6: Shitao 石濤 (1642–1707), Cinnebar Cliff and Deep Valley 丹崖巨壑, ink and colour on paper, 104.5 x 165.2 cm, Beijing, Palace Museum [reproduced from: Shitao shuhua quanji 石濤書畫全集 (Tianjin: Tianjin Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 2002), vol. 1, pl. 209]. Reproduced in Guohua Yuekan 1/4 (1935), 55. Fig. 7: He Tianjian, Mountain Pass 關山圖, 1936, hanging scroll, ink and colour on paper, 179.8 x 69.2 cm, Beijing, National Art Museum of China. Fig. 8: Wang Hui 王翬 (1632–1717), attr., copy after Wu Zhen 吳鎮 (1280–1354), “Mountain Pass on a Clear Autumn Day 關山秋霽,” leaf from the album To See the Large Within the Small 小中現大, Shanghai Museum [reproduced from: The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636), ed. Wai-kam Ho, exhibition catalogue The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1992), vol. 1, pl. 164–16]. Fig. 9: Wang Hui (1632–1717), attr., copy after Fan Kuan 范寬 (11th century): “Travellers between Mountains and Streams 谿山行旅,” leaf from the album To See the Large Within the Small, Shanghai Museum [reproduced from: The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555– 1636), vol. 1 (cf. fig. 8)], pl. 164–4]. Fig. 10: He Tianjian, Donkey Rider 策衛, 1936, hanging scroll, ink on paper, 115 x 38 cm, Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting.

ISABEL WÜNSCHE

Transgressing National Borders and Artistic Styles The November Group and the International Avant-Garde in Berlin during the Interwar Period The discourse on the avant-garde, particularly in the English-speaking academic world, has traditionally focused on Paris prior to the Second World War and New York in the post-war period. More recent studies on the avant-garde movements in Central and Eastern Europe have opened up the field to a broader discourse and taken a more diversified look at the European avant-garde.1 One of the most vibrant centres of the international avant-gardes during the interwar period was Berlin. A dynamic metropolis, fraught with political as well as social tensions, the city’s social space inspired the artistic production of the avantgarde and shaped cultural exchanges between East and West. The city also provided a home for a large cultural and artistic diaspora; the artists active in Berlin in the 1920s included Alexander Archipenko, Henryk Berlewi, Béla Czóbel, László Moholy-Nagy, László Péri, Ivan Puni, and Arthur Segal.2 However, because of its post-Second World War status as an outpost on the frontier between East and West, the essentially Western orientation of the Cold War narratives, and a predominantly formalist approach to avant-garde art, discussions of the 1920s art scene in Berlin have not extended far beyond Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (The Tempest) and Berlin dadaism. Influential organisations such as Die Novembergruppe (The November Group) and the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten (International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists), later Die Abstrakten (The Abstractionists), have attracted little attention although they served as important platforms for the artistic exchange of avant-garde artists from various national and cultural backgrounds, representing a variety of stylistic orientations and artistic expressions. This essay examines Berlin’s role as a centre of the international avant-gardes in the 1920s, with particular emphasis on the activities of the November Group, the intensive collaboration of the second generation of expressionists with the dadaists and constructivists, as well as the productive cooperation between visual artists, designers, architects, and musicians. Most of the artists’ groups arising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe were founded as a result of discontent with the selection criteria of the major exhibition venues and their respective juries. Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, progressive artists in cities throughout German-speaking Europe began to secede from the official salons, traditional artists’ societies, and art academies in order to form their own, independent exhibition associations.3 These new associations primarily focused on providing

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artists with alternative exhibition opportunities and a platform to present and sell their work to the public. The secessionist movement was a protest against the restrictive exhibition policies that favoured elite artists over their more experimental and less established colleagues; it challenged the authority of the royal academies, as well as the influence of imperial patrons and a conservative public, and championed modernist styles such as impressionism, naturalism, and symbolism.4 One of the first of these new artists’ groups in Berlin was the Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession), whose founding in May 1898 was preceded by the establishment of similar groups in Munich (1892) and Vienna (1897). Following a period of generally growing dissatisfaction, the decision to finally break with the traditional art establishment in Berlin came with the decision of the jury of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) to reject a landscape painting by Walter Leistikow, a key figure among a group of young artists who were strongly interested in modern developments in art.5 The new artists’ association was intended to be a more open and progressive organisation and to serve as an alternative to the conservative state-run Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists). At the first general meeting of the Berliner Secession, the founding members elected Max Liebermann as president and Walter Leistikow as first secretary; together with an executive committee they were entrusted with conducting the group’s affairs in accordance with the constitution that defined membership qualifications and members’ rights and could be amended only by a three-fourths majority.6 Along with Liebermann, Leistikow, and later Lovis Corinth, the cousins Bruno and Paul Cassirer, owners of a Berlin gallery and publishing house, became the executive secretaries and played a key role in the organisation of the group, which successfully supported modernist styles (particularly impressionism) and promoted an alternative to the traditional history and landscape painting and monumental sculpture glorifying Germany and the Hohenzollerns.7 The close collaboration of the Secession, an exhibition society, with the private gallery and publishing house of the Cassirer brothers brought each advantages: professional administration of the Secession’s affairs coupled with extended business opportunities for the Cassirers. Although founded as an alternative to the Berlin art establishment, the Secession originally intended to cooperate with the Association of Berlin Artists and the Art Academy, the organisers of the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition.8 When negotiations failed, the Secession opened its own exhibition space, first at Kantstraße 12 and then in 1905 at Kurfürstendamm 208/209, and established its own annual exhibitions: paintings, watercolours, and sculptures in spring-summer and an exhibition of graphic works in fall-winter (fig. 1).9 It was at these shows that the German public was first introduced to French impressionism and the post-impressionists, as well as works by painters such as Paul Cézanne, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch and sculptors such as Auguste Rodin and Constantin Meunier. With its close connections to the art market and the opening of its own exhibition building, the Berlin Secession provided artists with organisational, cultural, intellectual, and financial support and established

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Fig. 1: Preparations for the exhibition of the Berlin Secession, 1904, Bundesarchiv

ground-breaking professional standards for successful exhibition strategies and international networking strategies. Later, however, the Secession’s commitment to stylistic diversity began to falter as the group found it increasingly difficult to accommodate the work of the younger generation of expressionist artists.10 The jury of the 1910 annual exhibition turned down the works of 27 painters, among them the expressionists Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Müller, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as artists such as Arthur Segal and Georg Tappert. Under Tappert’s leadership, these artists then formed their own association, the Neue Secession (New Secession) and invited “those rejected by the Berlin Secession” to participate in their own exhibition at the Kunstsalon of Maximilian Macht in May 1910 (fig. 2).11 Although founded as an alternative to the Berlin Secession, the New Secession generally pursued the same ideals, organisational principles, and range of activities.12 Their deliberate support of expressionism and “new (modern) art” led to a close collaboration with the artists of Die Brücke (The Bridge) as well as the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association of Munich) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).13 This led to a new organisational structure; rather than collaborating with an art gallery, the New Secession was organised as a formally registered association with two classes of membership: active artist members and passive supporting members. Incorporated at the Amtsgericht Berlin-Mitte in June 1911, Pechstein, Tappert, Segal, Müller, and Heinrich Richter-Berlin served as

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Fig. 2: Max Pechstein, poster for the exhibition Those Rejected by the Berlin Secession, 1910, 69.5 × 93 cm, Berlin, Brücke-Museum

the initial management board.14 In existence from 1910 until 1914, the New Secession organised seven well-received shows in Berlin and a number of touring exhibitions15 and played a significant role in paving the way for the acceptance of expressionism in Berlin and in Germany. In addition to promoting the works of the artists of the Bridge, who had recently relocated from Dresden, and the Blue Rider, the New Secession also established contact with artists in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, and France; works by artists from other German cities as well as Scandinavian artists, the Czech cubists, and the French avant-garde were showcased in its exhibitions. The New Secession was among the first to present a comprehensive overview of the international art scene and its recent developments, predating with their fourth exhibition, in the winter of 1911, both the 1912 Sonderbundausstellung (Sonderbund Exhibition) in Cologne and Herwarth Walden’s 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) in Berlin.16 In 1913, another split occurred within the original Berlin Secession, when works by thirteen members were not accepted into the annual exhibition. After intense internal discussions, Liebermann, along with forty-one other artists, among them Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Max Slevogt, and Heinrich Zille, resigned and subsequently founded a third group in Berlin: the Freie Secession (Free Secession), with Liebermann as honorary president, in 1914.17 As Karl Scheffler noted, a gro-

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Fig. 3: Max Pechstein, Arbeitsrat für Kunst Berlin (Work Council of Art Berlin), 1919, 19.5 × 31.5 cm, Berlin, Akademie der Künste

tesque situation arose: “Those who remained [in the original Secession], legally constituted an organisation whose ideals they were not sufficiently talented to fulfil, while those who resigned could no longer call themselves members of the Berlin Secession, but truly represented its spirit.”18 This loss of a significant group of established artists offered opportunities for artistic renewal and fresh approaches to the changing art scene (and market), but the outbreak of war disrupted and prevented any such activities or further development. The Free Secession, in existence from 1914 to 1924, produced a number of exhibitions, but was likewise hindered by the war, which made it impossible to maintain a stable leadership and adequate support structures. As Paret notes, “without the administrative backing of Cassirer’s firm, the Free Secession could not achieve financial strength … [finally] the group disbanded at the height of the postwar inflation ….”19 The original Secession group, although remaining in existence well into the 1930s, yielded its role in Berlin as a promoter of modernist and avant-garde art after 1913; although too weak to sustain a rigorous exhibition policy, it did carry on as an economic interest group.20 In its stead, the literary and artistic avant-garde started to gather around Herwarth Walden’s Sturm magazine and gallery and to associate with like-minded artist groups in Germany and abroad. After the end of the First World War and the November Revolution, in 1918, a number of new artists’ groups were founded, among them the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art), the November Group, and the International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists. These new formations viewed themselves as artistically active, progressive forces that would take into their own hands the design of a new society by artistic means. The Work Council of Art was an association of architects, painters, sculptors, and art writers under the leadership of Bruno Taut (fig. 3); it was established as a response to the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Germany in 1918 and existed until 1921.21 During a time when it was almost impossible for architects and artists to receive commissions for buildings or artworks, members of the Council began work on a blueprint for a new society to be built in Germany. The Council strove to gain direct influence over cultural politics and the reorganisation of the artistic and cultural institutions in Germany following the First World War and the Revolution. Their demands included:

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recognition of the public nature of building activities, both state and private; removal of all privileges accorded to civil servants; dissolution of the Academy of Arts, the Academy of Building, and the Prussian Provincial Art Commission; liberation of the teaching of architecture, sculpture, painting, and handicrafts from state supervision; development of the museums as educational establishments for the people; removal of those monuments lacking artistic merit; formation of a state advisory body to oversee and promote the arts within the future legislative process.22

The Work Council of Art closely collaborated with the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) and the November Group. The November Group was likewise an association of radical and politically engaged artists, but in contrast to the efforts of previous artists’ initiatives, such as the Secession groups, their focus was not on serving as a meeting place or exhibition society for artists sharing a particular aesthetic, but to politically and creatively unite the forward-looking forces in the arts and architecture in order to gain influence in shaping contemporary political and cultural life and reconstructing German society after the First World War (fig. 4).23 In a circular dated 13 December 1918, Pechstein, César Klein, Tappert, Richter-Berlin, and Moriz Melzer — all of whom had been active in the New Secession and were also members of the Work Council of Art — called on their fellow artists to take action: The future of art and the gravity of the present moment compel us, the revolutionaries of the spirit (Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists), to mutual agreement and alliance. Therefore we are directing an urgent summons to all artists who have broken with old forms in art to declare their membership in the November Group. The establishment and realization of a broadly conceived program, to be carried out by trusted associates in the various centres of art, should bring us the greatest possible blend of the people and art. Renewed contact with like-minded people of all countries is our duty. Our creative instinct united us years ago as brothers. As an initial sign that we have joined together, a collective exhibition is being planned that is to be shown in all of the larger cities of Germany and later Europe.24

The wording of the announcement and the name of the group leave no doubt that its founding was a direct response to the revolutionary and anarchistic spirit of the moment. The artists saw themselves as the spiritual precursors of a political revolution whose foundation they had prepared with their rejection of traditional forms of expression, beginning around 1910. Taking as their campaign slogan the motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the group attempted to draw together elements of the French Revolution, sympathies for the October Revolution in Russia, and the ideas of the Socialist International (Second International 1889–1914). In the same spirit as the rallying cry of the communists, “Workers of the world, unite,” they called for an assembly of the progressive artists of all nations to form a united front of artists championing a modern artistic idiom and a leftist viewpoint. Within this frame-

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Fig. 4: Members of the November Group at the preparations for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1924, Bundesarchiv

work, representation of the specific interests of any particular professional group or stylistic approach was clearly secondary; composer Max Butting characterised this pronounced political-activist orientation as follows: “a human and politically revolutionary commitment was insisted upon, but exceptional tolerance was exercised with respect to the individual artistic temperament.”25 In 1919, the November Group — the self-proclaimed “association of radical fine artists — painters, sculptors and architects” — became an officially registered association with headquarters in Berlin. According to the statutes of 16 December 1918, the group was to be governed by a chairperson, secretary, and treasurer, but important decisions were to be reviewed and carried out by a Working Committee (Arbeitsausschuss) and voted upon at the official members’ assembly.26 Initially, the November Group consisted of a network of like-minded artists, sculptors, and architects based in Berlin and a number of regional groups in other art centres throughout Germany and Europe, among them the Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Expressionist Working Group) in Kiel, the groups Kräfte (Forces) in Hamburg, Die Kugel (The Sphere) in Magdeburg, Hallische Künstlergruppe (Halle Artists’ Group), Dresdener Secession Gruppe 1919 (Dresden Secession Group 1919), Das Junge Rheinland (The Young Rhineland) in Düsseldorf, the Rih group in Karlsruhe, the Üecht group in Stuttgart, and the Dutch De Stijl

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group, led by Theo van Doesburg.27 The representatives of the regional groups were among those who elected the Board and Working Committee,28 who were responsible for calling and conducting a general assembly, and for overseeing the election of its officers annually in order to maintain the group’s status as a registered association. Thus, the Berlin-based November Group served as an umbrella organisation responsible for setting policy and running the organisation’s business, but it was also instrumental in organizing the exchange of ideas, materials, and artworks among the regional groups, which fairly often were only one- or two-person ventures. Although loosely organised, this network structure offered regional affiliates a sense of participation in a large and comprehensive movement as well as additional exhibition venues. Most of the members of the November Group (e.g., Klein, Pechstein, Richter, Tappert) were also members of the Work Council for Art; there was a close cooperation between the two groups, whose goals were similar. The Work Council’s platform, direct participation and influence in cultural politics and art education, and reorganisation of existing artistic and cultural institutions, was subscribed to almost word for word by the November Group, whose January 1919 agenda makes clear that “the November Group is not a professional organisation, nor a (mere) exhibition society … through its comprehensive affiliation of like-minded, creative forces, the November Group wants to yield decisive influence over all questions of an artistic nature.”29 Like the Work Council, the November Group called for “influence upon and participation in” architectural commissions, restructuring of art schools and museums, exhibition spaces, and “the legislative process concerning the arts.”30 The members of the November Group derived their leadership role in the reorganisation of state and society from an assumed relationship between artistic revolution and political renewal; they believed that the revolutionary situation in Germany was the logical conclusion of the spiritual revolution that they themselves had introduced in the previous decade. This revolution, which had begun with the rejection of past artistic tradition, would now be extended to the masses and to all spheres of society. “Our many battle declarations over the years,” the 1919 circular proclaims, “have finally led to battle. The political upheaval has been decided in our favour.”31 Like the Worker Council, the November Group followed the maxim that: “Art and the people must be one. The arts shall no longer exist as the pleasure of few, but rather bring happiness and enrichment to the masses.”32 Its members saw it as their main task to introduce a broad range of society, particularly the “uneducated masses” of the proletarians, to current developments and new directions in art and architecture. The economic interests at stake here, however, cannot be overlooked. In addition to their sense of mission and natural claim to leadership, there were tangible economic benefits to be considered: by presenting a united front — joining together with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie — they could hope to gain a new and accepting audience and greater recognition, which would eventually serve to improve their social standing as well as their economic situation. In its

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Fig. 5: Georg Pahl, Rudolf Belling’s Dreiklang (Triad), 1919, 1929, Bundesarchiv

formative years, the society-building mission of the November Group found its most direct artistic expression in the intense graphic production of political posters, flyers, and announcements. The aesthetic reception of these works by the broad masses, however, was lukewarm at best. The November Group was characterised by mutual collaboration between its members and openness to a wide range of artistic ideas and stylistic methods of expression — an acceptance that was rather unusual for the majority of artists’ groups at the time. In their founding manifesto they explicitly called upon the expressionists, cubists, and futurists, but the group also included dadaists, constructivists, and later, representatives of the New Objectivity. The early years of the group’s existence, however, were dominated by expressionist viewpoints. In the 1920s, constructivism became the dominant artistic movement. This programmatic pluralism, characterised by some as “Cubofuto-expressionism,” was not unproblematic for the group’s self-definition, but it did provide the November Group with a generous means for integration and adaptation throughout its existence. In addition to a pronounced pluralism of artistic styles, the active collaboration of painters, sculptors, and architects was part of the group’s programme from the very beginning. In 1921, sections for literature and for music were added, leading the November Group, in the 1920s, to become one of the most important forums for new music and experimental film. Rudolf Belling, who viewed the relationship

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Fig. 6: Moriz Melzer, Der Dreiklang (Triad), 1920, 30 × 21.8 cm, Berlin, Berlinische Galerie

between the space surrounding a sculptural work of art as equal in importance to the sculptural object itself, was particularly committed to the ideal of a creative and harmonious synthesis of the various art forms. With his 1919 sculpture Dreiklang (Triad) (fig. 5), he created a work that symbolically unified painting, sculpture, and architecture, and additionally drew in music and dance. As can be seen from the 1920 cover design for the planned journal of the November Group, by Moriz Melzer (fig. 6), Der Dreiklang (Triad) became a symbol of the group’s ideals. Up until 1921, the members of the November Group maintained a largely consistent radical leftist stance, although “left” was relative and rather all-encompassing, with communist sympathies as well as social-democratic positions and utopian or visionary concepts of society being accommodated. Together with the Work Council for Art, the November Group continued to support the political and social revolution in Germany. In 1921, however, a time of great social tensions and growing economic turmoil in Germany, a major break occurred within the group. The artists further to the left, including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Rudolf Schlichter, and Georg Scholz, published an open letter in the magazine Der Gegner (The Opponent) in which they lamented the organisation’s retreat to “purely aesthetic revolutionary” positions and vehemently criticised the group’s loss of its political ideals, pursued in a misguided effort to ingratiate itself with the art establishment and bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic.33 The conflict was followed by the departure of the most politically en-

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gaged leftist artists from the group, leading to exactly the kind of “embourgeoisement” (Verbürgerlichung) that its opponents had feared and scorned. By 1922, most of the regional groups had also dissolved, and the November Group became a member of the Kartell fortschrittlicher Künstlergruppen in Deutschland (Cartel of Progressive Artists’ Groups in Germany). With this development, the November Group largely became that which it had once disparaged: a “(mere) exhibition society.” Nevertheless, it still viewed as its main objective the struggle for the recognition and acceptance of the “young art” and the latest trends in art and architecture. The increasing depoliticisation of the group’s activities, however, was significant to its longevity. Despite its founding as essentially a political, even revolutionary gesture, the November Group’s 1919 manifesto did provide for “continuing publications and an annual exhibition to be held in November.”34 A working committee for this purpose was provided, and members were granted equal access to the non-juried exhibition space. Thus, from the beginning, exhibitions, though not an objective of the group’s efforts, were viewed as an important means of presentation and this remained so throughout the association’s existence. Given that the November Group’s membership at times numbered in the several hundreds, it is surprising that only a small number of group exhibitions were realised. Of the annual exhibitions in November, only two small shows — one in 1919 and one in 1921 — were held, both at the Kunstantiquariat Fraenkel & Co in Berlin.35 In 1925, a comprehensive exhibition was held in the building of the Berlin Secession; on the occasion of the November Group’s ten-year anniversary in 1929, it dominated the Jury-Free Art Exhibition Berlin; and in 1931, it held an exhibition at the New House of the Association of Berlin Artists. Of great importance to the group’s presence in Berlin — and beyond — was its regular participation, between 1919 and 1932, in the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, held in the Exhibition Building at Lehrter Bahnhof. Here the group was given free reign to organise its own section in the assigned exhibition rooms (fig. 7). Although the Free Secession still dominated the 1919 and 1921 exhibitions — in 1921 featuring the cubists (Georges Braque, André Derain, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Picasso) but also showing Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Kokoschka — recognition of the November Group as a platform for the international avant-garde gradually increased in the early 1920s. In 1922 and 1923, the Polish constructivist Henryk Berlewi, the Russian artists Xenia Boguslavskaia and Ivan Puni, and the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky all exhibited in the November Group section at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. Puni presented his Synthetic Musician in 1922 (the work is now a trademark of the Berlinische Galerie) and El Lissitzky his groundbreaking Proun Room in 1923. The group’s 1923 presentation also included works by Theo van Doesburg and the Hungarian constructivists László Moholy-Nagy and László Peri, as well as paintings by the Romanian artist M. H. Maxy, who had studied with his countryman and November Group member Arthur Segal. In 1925, the presentation included architectural works by a group of architects from Prague, including Bohuslav Fuchs, František Kerhart, Oldřich Starý, Oldřich Tyl, and Jan Víšek. One of the

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Fig. 7: Floorplan of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1926

highlights of the November Group’s presentations at the Great Berlin Art Exhibitions in 1927 was the personal exhibition of Kazimir Malevich (figs. 8a + b). The only international exhibition of the November Group took place in Rome in 1920. The close collaboration between Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery and the Italian futurists broke off during the First World War, but the young futurist Enrico Prampolini was able to establish connections to the dadaist group in Zurich. In the early 1920s, he and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti renewed their contacts to the Sturm circle and also established close cooperations with the newly founded November Group and the International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists. On Prampolini’s initiative, the Esposizione Espressionisti November-Gruppe (Expressionists’ Exhibition of the November Group) was shown at the Casa d’Arte Italiana in Rome in 1920; it included 57 works by 29 artists, among them Otto Dix, César Klein, Otto Müller, Hilla von Rebay, and Kurt Schwitters.36 Looking at the November Group’s short list of publications, one finds evidence neither of a single unified aesthetic approach, nor of an art-political programme, but rather the pursuit of pedagogical objectives — a pursuit which developed out of the group’s aim to gain a decisive influence upon cultural politics and art education as well as the reorganisation of existing artistic and cultural institutions and to make modernist and avant-garde trends in art more accessible to the common

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Fig. 8a + b: Pages from the catalogue of works by Kazimir Malevich at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1927

people. The journal Der Kunsttopf (The Art Pot) (fig. 9), which included essays on new art and reproductions of works by members, was published with six issues in 1920. A planned publication series conceived by Raoul Hausmann and Hans Siebert von Heister resulted in only one edition in 1921. Between 1920 and 1924, however, the association did publish its own annual exhibition guides, which were meant to accompany the group’s presentations at the Great Berlin Art Exhibitions. In these guides, the works of the November Group were listed without title or artist attribution — an effort to retreat from an elitist approach to art and thus make the works more accessible to a larger audience.37 Beyond merely showcasing the latest trends and directions in contemporary art and architecture, the November Group also helped to shape the cultural and social life of Berlin in the 1920s. The group regularly organised artists’ festivals and costume balls as well as literary evenings and concert series. The 1925 exhibition catalogue lists some of the activities that took place between 1921 and May 1925, including a series of eleven concerts, in which new music by composers such as Anton Webern, Alan Berg, and Paul Hindemith was performed, and the Absolute Film Evening, which was held twice in May 1925 (fig. 10). The group’s screening of films by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walther Ruttmann, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia was a showcase for pioneering ex-

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Fig. 9: November Group/César Klein, front cover of Der Kunsttopf 1 (July 1920)

periments in this new field and turned out to be such a remarkable artistic event that even Art Nouveau artists such as Fidus were left “not unimpressed.” The catalogue also makes reference to a radio evening that was held in 1925 and a lecture on the “Nature of Music” in January 1925. The November Group arose out of the historical events and political-activist spirit of the November Revolution in Germany in 1918. Its founding members largely supported a politically progressive leftist stance and artistically modernist positions, and they believed that the stylistic revolutions in art, which they had helped to achieve, anticipated and were preparing the way for the political changes of the time. In the name of revolution, they strove to unite painters, sculptors, architects, writers, and filmmakers, but also to encompass a wide range of artistic movements, including expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, and even New Objectivity. Thus, despite a unified, revolutionary stance, its membership turned out to be quite heterogeneous with respect to the political viewpoints and artistic positions of the individual artists. Although the November Group functioned as a formally incorporated association, had a significant number of members, and was prominently represented in the art scene and cultural life of Berlin at the time, a comparison with other artists’ groups of the same period is difficult. Most such organisations (e.g., the Berlin Secession and its successors) were not only short-lived, but also closely tied to a particular artistic style or aesthetic. Avantgarde groups such as the Dutch De Stijl group, the Hungarian MA (Today) group,

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Fig. 10: November Group, programme for “Der Absolute Film,” 1925, Berlin, Berlinische Galerie

the dadaists, and the Russian and international constructivists tended to found (short-lived) periodicals, which they then used as a platform to promote their artistic agendas. The November Group, whose artistic agenda was not restricted to a particular aesthetic or style, served its members more importantly as a platform in itself for communication, exchange, and networking with other groups and artists. That is, despite its conspicuously revolutionary point of initial reference, it served in practice as a universal meeting place, presentation venue, and forum for exchange among the international avant-garde in Berlin during the interwar period.

Notes 1 Steven A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltics to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999); Timothy O. Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Kristina Passuth, Treffpunkte der Avantgarden: Ostmitteleuropa 1907–1930 (Meeting Places of the Avant-Gardes: Eastern and Central Europe 1907–1930) (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2003). 2 Passuth, Treffpunkte der Avantgarden (cf. note 1), 245–257. 3 “The Berlin Secession (1900),” German History in Documents and Images, http://germanhistory docs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=1655 (accessed 6 August 2014). 4 Ibid. 5 Anke Daemgen, “Die Neue Secession in Berlin” (The New Secession in Berlin) in Liebermanns Gegner: Die Neue Secession in Berlin und der Expressionismus (Liebermann’s Opponents: The New Secession in Berlin and Expressionism), ed. Stiftung Brandenburger Tor and Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig, exhibition catalogue Stiftung

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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Brandenburger Tor, Max-Liebermann-Haus, Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Schloss Gottorf (Cologne: Wienand, 2011), 14. Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), 59. “The Berlin Secession” (cf. note 3). Daemgen, “Die Neue Secession in Berlin” (cf. note 5), 15–16; Paret, The Berlin Secession (cf. note 6), 61–64. Daemgen, “Die Neue Secession in Berlin” (cf. note 5), 13–15. “The Berlin Secession” (cf. note 3). Daemgen, “Die Neue Secession in Berlin” (cf. note 5), 22–36; Paret, The Berlin Secession (cf. note 6), 210. Daemgen, “Die Neue Secession in Berlin” (cf. note 5), 22–23. The founding members of the New Secession were the artists Harold Tronson Bengen, Fritz Lederer, Moriz Melzer (second chairman), Max Pechstein (president), Heinrich Richter, Arthur Segal (chair of the working committee), Georg Tappert (first chairman), as well as the art dealers William Baron and Alfred Sauermann (business manager). The collaboration with the gallery Maximilian Macht lasted until 1911. Ibid., 27–28. Ibid., 52–53. Ibid., 22–83. Ibid., 53–68. Rudolf Pfefferkorn, Die Berliner Secession: Eine Epoche deutscher Kunstgeschichte (The Berlin Secession: An Epoch of German Art History) (Berlin: Haude & Spenersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1972), 51–54; Paret, The Berlin Secession (cf. note 6), 231–232. Paret, The Berlin Secession (cf. note 6), 231. Ibid. Ibid. Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Berlin 1918–21. Ausstellung mit Dokumentation (Work Council of Art, Berlin 1918–21: Exhibition with Documentation), exhibition catalogue Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1980); Eberhard Steneberg, Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Berlin 1918–21 (Work Council of Art, Berlin 1918–21) (Düsseldorf: Edition Marzona, 1987). Arbeitsrat für Kunst, “Flugblatt vom 1. März 1919” (Leaflet from 1 March 1919) in Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Berlin 1918–21 (cf. note 21), 5. “Richtlinien der Novembergruppe” (Guiding Principles of the November Group) in Will Grohmann, Zehn Jahre Novembergruppe (Ten Years November Group) (Berlin: Ottens, 1928), 11–12. For a comprehensive documentation of the November Group, see Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (The November Group), ed. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (Kunstverein Berlin) (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1969); Galerie Bodo Niemann, ed., Novembergruppe (November Group), exhibition catalogue Galerie Bodo Niemann (Berlin: Galerie Bodo Niemann, 1993). Novembergruppe, “Rundschreiben vom 13. Dezember 1918” (Circular from 13 December, 1918) in Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (cf. note 23), 55. Max Butting, Musikgeschichte, die ich miterlebte (Music History That I Experienced) (Berlin: Henschel, 1955). Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (cf. note 23), 57. In contrast to the International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists, documentation of the group’s annual reports to the Berlin district court is rather limited. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 57. “Richtlinien der Novembergruppe,” January 1919 (Guiding Principles of the November Group, January 1919) in Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (cf. note 23), 57. Ibid. Ibid. Arbeitsrat für Kunst, “Flugblatt vom 1. März 1919” (cf. note 22). “Offener Brief an die Novembergruppe” (Open Letter to the November Group), Der Gegner (The Opponent) 2 (1920), 8–9, 297–301.

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34 “Richtlinien der Novembergruppe” (cf. note 29), 57. 35 The 1919 exhibition included 19 paintings and sculptures by 18 artists, among them Hilla von Rebay and Emmi Roeder; the 1921 exhibition consisted of 21 paintings, 7 sculptures, and 1 architectural model by 26 artists, among them Rudolf Belling, Wassili Luckhardt and Georg Tappert. See Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (cf. note 23), 24, 26. 36 Ibid., 23. 37 See, for example, the following catalogues: Führer durch die Abteilung der Novembergruppe (Exhibition Guide through the Rooms of the November Group), exhibition catalogue Kunstausstellung Berlin (Berlin Art Exhibition) 1921 and 1922 (Berlin: Elsner, 1921).

Illustrations Fig. 1: Preparations for the exhibition of the Berlin Secession, 1904, photograph, Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1986-0718-502. Fig. 2: Max Pechstein, poster for the exhibition Those Rejected by the Berlin Secession, 1910, 69.5 × 93 cm, colour lithograph, Berlin, Brücke-Museum (reproduced from: Max Pechstein im Brücke-Museum Berlin, ed. Magdalena M. Moeller, exhibition catalogue Brücke Museum Berlin, Munich: Hirmer, 2001, 118). Fig. 3: Max Pechstein, Arbeitsrat für Kunst Berlin (Work Council of Art Berlin), woodcut, 19.5 × 31.5 cm, 1919, Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Archive (reproduced from: Arbeitsrat für Kunst 19181921, eds. Manfred Schlösser, Rosemarie Köhler, and Rose-France Raddatz, exhibition catalogue Akademie der Künste, Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1980, 88). Fig. 4: Members of the November Group at the preparations for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition 1924, photograph, Bundesarchiv Bild 183-S29554. Fig. 5: Rudolf Belling’s Dreiklang (Triad), 1919, here in a 1929 exhibition, photograph, Bundesarchiv Bild 102-08322 / Georg Pahl. Fig. 6: Moriz Melzer, Der Dreiklang (Triad), watercolour and pencil, 30 × 21.8 cm, 1920, Berlin, Helga Kliemann Archive, Berlinische Galerie. Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, (reproduced from: Gesamtkunstwerk Expressionismus. Kunst, Film, Literatur, Theater, Tanz und Architektur 1905 bis 1925, eds. Ralf Beil and Claudia Dillmann, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010, 165). Fig. 7: Floorplan of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1926, rooms 24–26: November Group (reproduced from: Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. 1926, ed. Verein Berliner Künstler, exhibition catalogue Landesausstellungsgebäude am Lehrter Bahnhof, 1926, 4–5). Figs. 8a + b: Pages from the catalogue of works by Kazimir Malevich at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1927 (reproduced from: Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. 1927, ed. Kartell der Vereinigten Verbände Bildender Künstler Berlins, exhibition catalogue Landesaustellungsgebäude Alt-Moabit 4–10 am Lehrter Bahnhof (Veröffentlichung des Kunstarchivs, Nr. 41/42, Berlin: Diehl, 1927), 100 and 107. Fig. 9: November Group/César Klein, front cover of Der Kunsttopf (The Art Pot) 1 (July 1920) (reproduced from: Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1969, 19). Fig. 10: November Group, programme for “Der Absolute Film” (The Absolute Film), 1925, Berlinische Galerie (Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst. Fotografie und Architektur), Archiv, Inv. BG-OM 288 (Photo: Isabel Wünsche).

IV. PLATES

PLATE I

Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Fairy Woman 僊女, 1926, 280 × 171 cm, Ōtani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City

PLATE II

Hashimoto Kansetsu 橋本関雪, Visiting the Hermit 訪隠, 1930, 221 × 176 cm, Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi City

Shitao 石濤, Scroll of the Yellow Mountain 黄山図巻, 1699, 28.7 × 182.1 cm, Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Kyoto

PLATE III

PLATE IV

a) Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Reflections: Art in the Contact Zone” and “Philosophy in the Contact Zone: Europe under the Spell of Fetishism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum b) Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Appropriations: Europeanism and Primitivism,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

PLATE V

a) Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Sweetness and Power: Entanglements of Exploitation,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum b) Exhibition intervention “Provincializing Europe – the Afrocentric Gaze”/ “Art and the Birth of Modernity,” 2014, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum

PLATE VI

Front cover of the exhibition catalogue Madsimu Dsangara (Die Schatten der Vergessenen), Vienna 1934

PLATE VII

Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923, 100 × 81.3 cm, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

PLATE VIII

a) John Koenakeefe Mohl, Snow morning, Sophiatown, 1942, 45.6 × 59.8 cm, private collection

b) Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, Untitled (Man and woman walking), 1969, 30 × 24.8 cm, property of the artist

PLATE IX

Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi, In the strong wind near South Africa, 1983, 114 × 85 cm, private collection

PLATE X

Meschac Gaba, Contemporary Archeology, 2003, multimedia installation: still from an animated video, ground penetrating radar of buried objects in the ground, interactive computer displays, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

PLATE XI

Jamini Roy, Mother and Child, c. 1940s, dimensions unknown, courtesy of the artist’s family

PLATE XII

Lygia Pape, Poema luz, 1957, 41.5 × 54.5 cm, 41.7 × 54.2 cm, 40 × 70 cm, Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

PLATE XIII

Lygia Pape, Luz, detail of Livro da criação, 30 × 30 cm, Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

Qiu Zhijie, Map of Total Art, 2012, c. 5 m length, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

PLATE XIV

PLATE XV

He Tianjian, Landscape (Town Wall by a River and Floating Clouds), 1935, 121 × 44 cm, present collection unknown, reproduced in Guohua yuekan 1/11–12 (1935)

PLATE XVI

He Tianjian, Mountain Pass, 1936, 179.8 × 69.2 cm, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

V. APPENDIX

List of Contributors MICHAEL ASBURY is an art historian, critic and curator. Born in Teresópolis, Brazil, he later came to England and completed an MA in the Study of Contemporary Art at Liverpool University, followed by a PhD in the History and Theory of Art at the London Institute, now known as University of the Arts London. His doctoral thesis examined Hélio Oiticica and his relation to the development of modernism in Brazil and beyond. Since completing his doctorate in 2003, Asbury has worked at the University of the Arts London, initially as a research fellow, and now as a reader in the Theory and History of Art and as course leader for the MA in Visual Arts: Transnational Arts, at Camberwell College of Arts. He is also a core member of the research centre for Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation (TrAIN). An internationally recognised specialist in modern and contemporary art in Brazil, he has published extensively and has curated numerous exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Latin America. PAULINE BACHMANN is currently a research fellow in the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art and a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich. Her ongoing project focuses on post-war avant-garde participatory art in Brazil (1950s and 1960s) and its reception in Europe and the United States from a transcultural perspective. She studied Latin American Literature and Culture as well as History and Art History in Berlin, France, Costa Rica, and Mexico. She finished her MA with a thesis on representations of the Caribbean in 2010. In 2009, she curated the exhibition La revolución perdida — artistas jóvenes de Nicaragua in the Galerie Subsuelo, Berlin, as part of the cultural programme for the international conference 30 años Revolución Sandinista — Actualidad y Retrospectiva de movimientos sociales at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. BIRGIT HOPFENER is an art historian and sinologist who focuses on Chinese art history as well as transcultural issues in art historical methodology and artistic research. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin. She was previously adjunct professor for the Histories of China at Heidelberg University and assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. Her postdoctoral project, which enjoys the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG), examines the cultural and historical conditions for Sun Yuan’s und Peng Yu’s art from a transcultural perspective. Hopfener is also an active curator and art writer. Her articles on contemporary art with a focus on art from China have been published in artnet magazine, Yishu, Texte zur Kunst, Leap, and others. She has curated shows for the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Goethe-Institut in Hong Kong and Beijing, the Edith-Ruß-Haus in Oldenburg, and OCAT Shenzhen.

328

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

SHIGEMI INAGA is Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto and at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Hayama. He specialises in intercultural relations and comparative literature. His major publications in Japanese with summaries in Western languages include La Crépuscule de la peinture: La lutte posthume d’Édouard Manet (1997), L’Orient de la peinture: De l’orientalisme au japonisme (1999), Images on the Edge: A Historical Survey of East Asian Trans-Cultural Modernities (2013), and In Search of Haptic Plasticity: Souls Touching Each Other, Forms Interwoven (2016). He has been awarded the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities, the Ringa Art Encouragement Prize, the Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, and the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Prize. PAOLA IVANOV is an ethnologist and, since 2012, curator of the East, North East, Central and South Africa collections of the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. After obtaining her PhD at Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität Munich in 1997 she worked at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and as a senior researcher at the University of Bayreuth, where she received her habilitation in 2013. Her research focuses on art, aesthetics, and visual/material culture in Africa as well as on African history and its global interconnectedness. Her more recent work has dealt with the relationship between translocality and aesthetics in the Muslim coastal societies of East Africa (“Swahili”). Her curatorial work includes the exhibitions Benin — 600 Years of Court Art in Nigeria, Provincializing Europe — The Afrocentric Gaze and Enchantment/Beauty-Parlour. MELANIE KLEIN is a postdoctoral research fellow at the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art and a lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. In her PhD dissertation she investigated images of masculinity and artistically negotiated spaces of identification in art from South Africa. Her recent research focuses on manifestations, transformations, and continuities of aesthetic concepts such as authenticity and originality in modern and contemporary art from Africa. Current publications include studies on art teaching in South Africa and Uganda as well as on topical representations of queerness in these countries. TOMOKO MAMINE studied Art History and History at Freie Universität Berlin and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She worked as a curatorial assistant for several exhibitions, including BEUYS. Die Revolution sind wir at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2008–2009. Since April 2011 she has been a member of the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art in the Department of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. Her current research project focuses on art in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly on the Gutai Art Association. PARTHA MITTER, Honorary D.Lit. of the Courtauld Institute of Art, is Emeritus Professor of Art History at University of Sussex. He has been a Junior Research

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

329

Fellow at Churchill College and an Open Research Fellow of Clare Hall, both in Cambridge; Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; member of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; and a Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington D.C. He was also Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecturer at All Souls College in Oxford. His books include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977), Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922 (1994), Indian Art (2002), and The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the AvantGarde 1922–1947 (2007). At present he is working on the global turn of modernism, post-modernism, and late modernism. JULIANE NOTH is principle investigator of the German Research Foundation (DFG) research project “Landscape, Canon, and Intermediality in Chinese Painting of the 1930s and 1940s” in the Art History Department of Freie Universität Berlin. Her main field of research is the re-configuration of Chinese painting traditions in the twentieth century. She is the author of Landschaft und Revolution. Die Malerei von Shi Lu (2009), and co-editor of Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in a Global Context (2012), Huang Binhong and the Evolution of Modern Ideas in Art (in Chinese, 2014), and The Itineraries of Art: Topographies of Artistic Mobility in Europe and Asia (2015). SYLVESTER OKWUNODU OGBECHIE is Professor of Art History and Visual Cultures of Global Africa at the University of California Santa Barbara. He completed his PhD at Northwestern University in 2000. His publications include Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (2008) and Making History: The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection (2011). He is the founder and editor of Critical Interventions. His research focuses on cultural informatics and global African cultural patrimony, and he is currently working on a historiography of modern and contemporary African art. MATTHEW RAMPLEY is chair of art history at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on questions in art criticism, theory, and historiography, with an emphasis on the work and legacy of Aby Warburg as well as the Vienna School of art history. A particular area of interest is the cultural politics of art history and criticism. His principal publications include: Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity (2000), The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (2000), Art, History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (co-edited, 2012), The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918 (2013), and The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience (2017). He is currently leading a project on the cultural politics of museums of art and design in Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century.

330

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

GEORG VASOLD studied Art History and European Ethnology in Vienna and Utrecht. From 1993 to 1999 he worked as co-curator at the Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum St. Pölten in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. In 2004 he received his PhD from the University of Vienna and worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Art History, University of Vienna. Since 2011 he has been a member of the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art in the Department of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. His main area of interest is art historiography. Vasold is the author of Alois Riegl und die Kunstgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte (2004) and co-editor of Alois Riegl Revisted (2010). TOBIAS WENDL has been Professor for Art and Visual Culture in Africa at Freie Universität Berlin since 2010 and is one of the founding members of the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art. He has also been a charter member of the special research field Affective Societies (SFB 1171) since 2015. From 2001 to 2010, he was the director of the Iwalewahaus at the Africa Centre at the University of Bayreuth. He studied anthropology, literature, psychology, and linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich where he also received his PhD in 1990. His research interests focus on antique, modern, and contemporary African art and the African diaspora, on religion, media, and popular urban cultures and on museum- and exhibition studies. He is also a filmmaker who has realised several documentaries in Africa and received various awards for his film work. ISABEL WÜNSCHE is Professor of Art and Art History at Jacobs University, Bremen. She studied Art History and Classical and Christian Archaeology in Berlin, Moscow, Heidelberg, and Los Angeles and received her PhD from Heidelberg University in 1997. Her research interests are European modernism, the avant-garde movements, abstract art, and émigré networks. She has received numerous grants and research fellowships. Her book publications include Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence, 1924–1945 (2006), Biocentrism and Modernism (with Oliver A.I. Botar, 2011), Kunst & Leben. Michail Matjuschin und die Russische Avantgarde in St. Petersburg (2012), Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (with Paul Crowther, 2012), and The Organic School of the Russian AvantGarde: Nature’s Creative Principles (2015).

Index Afonso I (Nvemba a Nzinga) 50 Alberts, Paul 83 Algeria 182 Altamira 32 Amaral, Tarsila do 146–150 Amselle, Jean-Loup 171 Anatsui, El 77 Anderfuhren, Martine 171 Anderson, Benedict 78, 197–198 Andrade, Oswald de 143, 146–148 Andre, Carl 141 Angola 63–64, 181–182 Aoki Masaru 37 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 160 Appleton, Jay 100–101 Archipenko, Alexander 291 Arendt, Hannah 111 Attia, Kader 182–184 Austria 77, 122–123, 126–127, 129, 132–133, 158, 196 Bactria 131 Bada Shanren 40 Bailey, Beezy 179 Bakhtin, Mikhail 198 Bantu 154, 161 Barlach, Ernst 294 Bartosch, Berthold 124, 128 Battiss, Walter 83, 179–181 Bavaria 59 Bechuanaland 155 Beckmann, Max 294 Beckx, Jaspar 51 Beier, Georgina 170 Beier, Ulli 74, 85, 170 Belling, Rudolf 299 Belloli, Carlo 214, 216 Beltracchi, Wolfgang 175 Benin 62, 72–73, 172–173, 186 Benjamin, Walter 200, 203 Berg, Alan 303 Berger, Stefan 71–72 Berlewi, Henryk 291, 301 Berlin 50, 58, 63–64, 127–128, 172, 182, 184–186, 197, 291–298, 301–305 Berman, Esmé 78, 180

Bhabha, Homi 71, 85–86, 144, 146, 150 Bloch, Ernst 126 Blocker, H. Gene 94 Boguslavskaia, Xenia 301 Böhme, Hartmut 54, 58 Bois, W.E.B. du 12 Boonzaier, Gregoire 82 Born, Wolfgang 130 Bosnia 126 Botswana 159 Boyd, Brian 107–108 Brandon, Robert 107 Braque, Georges 301 Brazil 51, 61, 141–150, 209–224 Brink, Roelien 181 Britain 72, 74, 76, 81–82, 84, 99, 129, 150, 155, 163, 173, 180–182, 195, 209, 222 Brocos, Modesto 148–150 Brussels 178–179 Buren, Daniel 181 Burke, Edmund 171 Cabral, Pedro Alvares 147 Calcutta 195–196, 199, 202–203 Cameroon 178, 186 Canclini, Néstor Garcia 144–146 Cape of Good Hope 72 Cape Town 179 Capuchin missionaries 51, 57 Carman, Jillian 80–82 Carroll, Joseph 107, 111 Casey, Maie 200 Cassirer, Bruno 292, 295 Cassirer, Ernst 211, 219 Cassirer, Paul 292, 295 Castro, Amilcar de 210–211 Catherine, Norman 180 Cézanne, Paul 40, 269, 292 Chagall, Marc 269 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 50 Chang, Johnson 232 Chen Baoyi 268 Chen Hongshou (Chen Laolian) 40 Chen Yingmei 268 Chibinda Ilunga 63–65

332

INDEX

Chicago 196 China 31–42, 100, 104, 121, 129, 133, 181, 185, 195, 229–242, 265–285 Chokwe 63–64 Ciss Kanakassy, El Haji Mansour 184–186 Clark, Lygia 209–213, 218 Cologne 178, 294 Congo 48, 50–60, 63–64, 184 Constable, John 105, 271 Corinth, Lovis 292 Cürlis, Hans 127–128 Czech Republic 294 Czóbel, Béla 291 Da Vinci, Leonardo 268, 271 Dakar 170, 184–185 Danto, Arthur 100 Darmstadt 121–122 Darwin, Charles 94–102, 104–105, 108, 111, 150, 267 David, Jacques-Louis 63–64 Davidson, Donald 94 Davies, Stephen 104–105, 110 Dawkins, Richard 98, 102, 105–106 De Chirico, Giorgio 269 De Klerk, Frederik Willem 175 Defoe, Daniel 174 Défossés, Pierre Romain 170 Derain, André 37, 301 DeSouza, Allan 182 Diaghilev, Sergej Pawlowitsch 195 Dike, Ndidi 78 Dix, Otto 300, 302 Doesburg, Theo van 298, 301 Dong Qichang 269 Dresden 294, 297 Duarte, Paulo Sergio 141–144, 146 Duchamp, Marcel 143, 174, 181, 242, 255, 258 Düsseldorf 297 Dutton, Dennis 100–101, 104, 106–107, 111 Eggeling, Viking 303 Egypt 104, 202 Einstein, Carl 201 Ekpuk, Victor 77 Elkins, James 87, 196–197 England 154, 271 Enwezor, Okwui 73–74, 170, 189

Enwonwu, Ben 76–77, 85 Essen 201 Ethiopia 48 Everard, Bertha 82 Fabian, Johannes 47 Fakeye, Lamidi 76 Fan Kuan 282 Fanon, Frantz 175 Feng Zikai 42–43 Feni, Dumile 83 Fergusson, James 195 Fidus 304 Firth, Raymond 93–94 Fisahn, Maria 186 Flavin, Dan 141 Forti, Simone 247 France 60, 63, 100, 110, 129, 171, 178, 182–184, 195, 198, 247, 268, 271, 292, 294, 296 Frankfurt 49, 186 Freud, Sigmund 54, 111 Frobenius, Leo 170 Fuchs, Bohuslav 301 Gaba, Meshac 186–187 Galton, Francis 150 Gandhara 131 Gandhi, Mahatma 199 Gauguin, Paul 37, 40, 55 Geers, Kendell 175–177 Germany 56, 97, 127, 129, 132, 156, 158, 160, 195, 201–202, 212, 223, 247, 292, 294–297, 300–301, 304 Ghana 77 Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco) 271 Givon, Linda 180 Gleizes, Albert 301 Glück, Heinrich 123 Gogh, Vincent van 37, 40–41 Goldblatt, David 83 Gomringer, Eugen 212 Goniwe, Thembinkosi 80–81 Gould, Stephen Jay 107 Greece 106–107, 169, 197, 202 Green, Jonathan Adagogo 85 Gris, Juan 301 Grosse, Ernst 97, 119 Grossert, John Watt 154, 158–163 Grosz, Elizabeth 95

INDEX

Grosz, George 300 Guan Tong 282 Guggenheim, Peggy 198 Gullar, Ferreira 210–223 Guo Xi 275 Gurlitt, Cornelius 119 Haiti 60 Halle 297 Hallward, Peter 144–146 Hamburg 186, 297 Hammons, David 177 Hangzhou 268 Hanslik, Erwin 123–130 Harare (former Salisbury) 170 Harrison (later Robinson), Ann 159–160 Harvard 182 Hashimoto Kansetsu 31–43 Hausenstein, Wilhelm 201 Hausmann, Raoul 300, 303 Hazoumé, Romuald 172–174 He Bingsong 267 He Tianjian 266, 268, 274–285 Heartfield, John 300 Heckel, Erich 293 Hedin, Sven 127 Heister, Hans Siebert von 303 Hersey, George 106 Heywood, Linda 50–51 Hildebrand, Grant 101, 106 Hindemith, Paul 303 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 303 Höch, Hannah 300 Hopkins, Sam 187 Hory, Elmyr de 175 Hu Peiheng 278 Huang Binhong 268 Huang Gongwang 280, 282 Hughes, Langston 85 Humboldt, Alexander von 123 Hungary 301, 304 Huxley, Thomas 267, 276 Iceland 100 Ife 72 India 50, 123–124, 128–129, 131, 195– 203 Inukai Tsuyoshi 34 Ise Sen’ichirō 37, 42 Italy 177, 195, 197, 214, 247, 302

Jantjes, Gavin 80–81, 84 Japan 31–43, 104, 121, 129, 195, 247–261, 266–268, 272 Jardim, Reinaldo 210–212 Jelinek, Robert 189 Jesuit missionaries 51 Jīn Nóng (Jīn Dōngxīn) 39–40 Jing Hao 282 Johannesburg 157, 180–181 Johns, Jasper 141, 175, 181 Joyce, James 175, 195 Judd, Donald 141 Kaikan 35 Kandinsky, Wassily 42, 196, 200–202, 301 Kanem-Bornu (kingdom) 72 Kaprow, Allan 247 Karlsruhe 297 Kassel 172–174 Kentridge, William 181 Kenya 100, 182, 187 Kerhart, František 301 Key, Ellen 127 Kiel 297 Kimpa Vita, Beatriz 57, 60 Kinbara Seigo 42–43 Kinoshita Toshiko 258 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 293 Kjersmeier, Carl 170 Klee, Paul Ernst 195, 202, 301 Klein, César 296, 302 Klimt, Gustav 123, 127, 292 Kobe 247 Kohn, Marek 102 Kokoschka, Oskar 123, 301 Komar, Vitaly 99–100 Kooning, Willem de 257 Kosuth, Joseph 141–142 Kramrisch, Stella 123, 133, 196 Krause, Wolfgang 186 Kugler, Franz 119 Kumalo, Sydney 83 KwaZulu-Natal 154, 159 Kyoto 31, 34, 37–39, 42 Lagerlöf, Selma 127 Lagos 76, 85 Langer, Susanne K. 211 Lascaux 109

333

334 Lasekan, Akinola 76–77 Leeb, Susanne 49, 210 Leeb-du Toit, Juliette 159, 163 Léger, Fernand 303 Leipzig 127 Leistikow, Walter 292 Lesotho 159 Levine, Sherry 175 Lewitt, Sol 181 Lewontin, Richard 107 Li Baoquan 266, 268–273, 275–276 Li Sixun 269, 271 Li Weiming 268 Lichtenstein, Roy 141 Liebermann, Max 292, 294 Lipps, Theodor 42 Lissitzky, El 211, 301 Liu, Lydia 272–273, 276 Lods, Pierre 170 London 159, 173, 175, 180, 197 Lorrain, Claude 271 Lu Danlin 265 Lubumbashi 170 Lunda 63–64 Luo Zhenyu 34 Macht, Maximilian 293 Madagascar 231–233, 238, 241 Magdeburg 297 Magnin, André 170–171 Majavu, Mandisi 80–81, 84 Makerere 154–155, 161–163 Malevich, Kazimir 211, 302 Malraux, André 141 Mammì, Lorenzo 210 Manchuria 268 Mancoba, Ernest 81–82 Mandela, Nelson 73, 80, 82, 175, 177 Mangueira 221 Mao Zedong 230 Martin, Jean-Hubert 171 Martins, Sergio 210 Marx, Karl 54, 111 Matisse, Henri 37, 257 Maxy, M. H. 301 McEwen, Frank 170 Meegeren, Han van 175 Melamid, Alexander 99–100 Melzer, Moriz 296, 300 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 213

INDEX

Meunier, Constantin 292 Miller, Geoffrey 101 Mintz, Sidney W. 61 Mithen, Steven 99, 102 Mohl, John Koenakeefe 154–158 Moholy-Nagy, László 301 Mondrian, Piet 222, 253 Monet, Claude 269 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat Baron de 174 Mosquito, Nástio 181 Müller, Otto 293, 302 Müller, Robert 124 Munch, Edvard 292 Munich 197, 292–293 Murakami Kagaku 39 Murakami Saburō 247–260 Musa, Hassan 169–170 Nagao Uzan 34 Naitō Konan 34, 37 Nakamura Fusetsu 42 Namibia 156, 159 Namuth, Hans 257 Nanjing 229–233, 235, 238–239, 241 Napoleon Bonaparte 63–65 Natal 72, 154, 159 Ndaleni 154, 158–160, 163 Netherlands 51, 66, 72, 81, 271, 297, 304 New York 174, 197, 247 Ngetchopa, Jean-Baptiste 186 Nishimaki Isamu 43 Ni Yide 268 Ni Zan 271, 282 Nigeria 48, 62, 71–78, 81, 84–85, 87, 170, 172, 189 Nok 72 Nolde, Emil 293 Norwich 93 Nsukka 77 Ntobe, Joyce 179 Nzinga a Nkuvu (João I of Kongo) 50 O’Hear, Anthony 97 Offoedu-Okeke, Onyema 71, 75 Oga Seiun 42 Oguibe, Olu 75, 170 Oiticica, Hélio 209–211, 218–224 Okeke, Uchu 74 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 75, 189

INDEX

Okorie, Nnena 77 Oldenburg, Claes 141 Onabolu, Aina 74, 76– 77, 85 Onians, John 93 Ortiz, Fernando 146 Orwell, George 174 Osaka 247 Osborne, Peter 49, 51, 142–143 Oshogbo 77, 170 Osorio, Luis Camilo 209 Oyo (kingdom) 72 Pagel, Mark 99, 102 Pape, Lygia 210, 212–219, 222 Paris 55, 81, 146–147, 158, 170, 172, 178, 182, 195, 197, 247 Pechstein, Max 293–296, 298 Pedrosa, Mário 220 Peffer, John 48, 55, 80 Pemba, George 82 Péri, László 291 Persia 32, 121, 174 Phillips, Tom 180 Picabia, Francis 303 Picasso, Pablo 81, 171, 186, 195, 200, 257, 301 Pierneef, Jacob 82 Pignatari, Décio 212 Pissarra, Mario 71, 80–81, 83–84 Pissarro, Camille 269 Pollock, Jackson 257 Portugal 50–52, 54, 73, 100 Post, Frans 61 Poussin, Nicolas 271 Power, Camilla 101 Prague 301 Prampolini, Enrico 302 Pratt, Marie Louise 197 Pretoria 180 Proust, Marcel 195 Puni, Ivan 291, 301 Qian Shoutie 32, 34 Qiu Zhijie 229–235, 238–242 Rebay, Hilla von 302 Rembrandt 271 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 40 Reynolds, Joshua 74 Richter-Berlin, Heinrich 293, 296, 298

335

Richter, Hans 303 Richthofen, Ferdinand von 123 Riedle, Gabriele 172 Riegl, Alois 119, 122 Rio de Janeiro 209, 211–212, 218, 220, 222–223 Ritter, Carl 123 Robbroeck, Lize van 80–83, 87 Rodin, Auguste 292 Romania 301 Rome 197, 302 Rosthorn, Arthur von 132 Rousseau, Henri “Le Douanier” 40–41 Roy, Jamini 195–203 Russia 99–100, 195, 198, 201–202, 211, 215, 296, 301, 305 Ruttmann, Walther 303 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 59 Sacks, Ruth 181 Salvador de Bahía 218 Santiniketan 196, 242 São Paulo 143–144, 209, 212–213, 222 Sarcelles 182 Saunders, Walter 180 Scheffler, Karl 294 Schiele, Egon 123 Schlemmer, Oskar 201–202 Schlichter, Rudolf 300 Schlosser, Julius von 119 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 293 Schnaase, Karl 119 Scholz, Georg 300 Schütt, Otto H. 64 Schwanenfeld, Olga 129, 132 Schwarz, Roberto 143–144 Schwitters, Kurt 302 Sebidi, Helen Mmakgabo 83, 154, 156–157, 162 Segal, Arthur 291, 293, 301 Sekoto, Gerard 81–82, 158 Senegal 177, 184 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 170 Serra, Richard 141 Shanghai 34, 42, 265, 268, 280 Shiraga Kazuo 247, 254 Shitao 37–40, 278, 280 Shonibare, Yinka 77 Siegelaub, Seth 181 Sihlali, Durant 83

336 Skotnes, Cecil 83 Slevogt, Max 294 Sloon, Robert 181 Smithson, Robert 141 Sono Raizō 42 Sophiatown 155–156 South Africa 71–74, 78–87, 153–162, 175–177, 179–181, 188 Soyinka, Wole 170 Soyo 51 Spain 109–110 Spanudis, Theon 210 Spencer, Herbert 95, 97 Speneder, Leopold 123 Spivak, Gayatri 146 Spolsky, Ellen 103 St. Louis 186 Starý, Oldřich 301 Stern, Irma 82 Stiaßny, Melanie 129–130, 132 Stockholm 127 Stopforth, Paul 83 Strachwitz, Artur Graf von 131–132 Stravinsky, Igor 195 Strzygowski, Josef 119–134 Stumpf, Manfred 186 Stuttgart 297 Summers, David 109–110, 112 Swaziland 159 Sweden 127 Switzerland 223 Syria 121, 123 Tagore, Abanindranath 199 Tagore, Rabindranath 196, 199, 242 Tapié, Michel 247 Tappert, Georg 293, 296, 298 Taut, Bruno 295 Thornton, John 50–51, 60 Toguo, Barthélémy 178–179 Tokyo 36, 247, 253, 258 Tomasello, Michael 109–110, 112 Tomioka Kenzō 37 Tomioka Tessai 34 Trowell, Margaret 154, 159, 161–163 Tsien, Moi 182 Turin 247 Turner, Frederick 103, 111 Turner, William 271 Tyl, Oldřich 301

INDEX

Uganda 153–155, 162 Ulm 212 United Kingdom 61, 77 United States of America 60, 100, 104, 141, 144, 177, 181–182, 196–198, 212, 229, 241, 257, 267 Vantongerloo, Georges 211 Vasari, Giorgio 197 Venancio Filho, Paulo 215 Vermeule, Blakey 107 Vienna 122–124, 127–132, 184, 292 Villa, Edoardo 83 Víšek, Jan 301 Vlaminck, Maurice de 37 Volkert, Johannes 42 Von Sydow, Eckard 170 Wachsberger, Arthur 130–131 Wagner, Otto 123 Walden, Herwarth 291, 294–295, 302 Wallace, Alfred Russel 95–96 Wang Guowei 34 Wang Hui 40, 282–283 Wang Meng 283 Wang Wei 269, 271 Warburg, Aby 97, 119 Warhol, Andy 141, 175 Washington, George 100 Webern, Anton 303 Weiner, Lawrence 181 Weissmann, Franz 210 Welles, Orson 175 Wellesz, Emmy 131–132 Wells, H.G. 175 Welsch, Wolfgang 96 Wenger, Susanne 76–77, 85, 170 Wickhoff, Franz 119, 122 Wilson, Edward 98 Wilson, Fred 177–178 Wilson, Woodrow 127 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 195 With, Karl 127 Wittkower, Rudolf 121 Woermann, Karl 119 Wolff, Gustav Heinrich 56–58 Wu Changshi 34, 36 Wu Zhen 280, 282

INDEX

Xie Haiyan 265–268, 273–274 Xie He 42, 275 Yad Vashem 132 Yan Fu 267, 276 Yaoundé 178 Ye Gongchuo 265 Yi Gu 278, 285 Yokohama 36 Yoruba 76–77, 172 Yoshihara Jirō 247, 249, 251, 253, 257, 259 Yu Jianhua 268 Yun Shouping (Yun Nantian) 40

Zaloscer, Hilde 132 Zambia 101 Zaria 74 Zhang Yanyuan 275 Zheng Wuchang 265–268, 273, 285 Zhu Xi 236 Zhu Zhu 230 Zille, Heinrich 294 Zolghadr, Tirdad 171 Zong Bing 276 Zunshine, Lisa 103 Zurich 302

337